5G mid-band spectrum winners receive their FCC licenses
The winners of a critical FCC auction for midband spectrum that ended last November have received their official grants of license to use the airwaves for which they spent a total of $22.4 billion, the FCC announced Wednesday.
A total of 4,041 licenses were issued to 23 different bidders, according to the commission. Licensees hoping to use the spectrum for 5G rollouts still have to reimburse incumbent non-federal users of the band, which had been in use for radiolocation purposes, and the FCC said that further details about those costs would be laid out in a subsequent filing.
Auction 110 saw the government sell off 100MHz of spectrum in the midband — around the 3.45GHz range — divided into 10 10MHz blocks for each Partial Economic Area or PEA that the FCC adopted in 2014. (There are 416 PEAs covering the US, meaning that 119 specific licenses were not sold in the auction.)