CBA Criticizes T-Mobile's C-Band Incentive Auction Proposal

摘要

The C-Band Alliance has criticized T-Mobile US, Inc.'s, revised incentive auction proposal for repurposing spectrum in the 3.7-4.2 gigahertz band for 5G terrestrial services. Under the revised proposal released last month, T-Mobile said that satellite earth station registrants would be able to participate in the incentive auction, which T-Mobile said could result in the repurposing of more spectrum - up to 500 MHz (TR, March 1). In a recent ex parte filing in GN docket 18-122, the CBA, which is pushing a private market-based plan, said it believed that T-Mobile's original proposal "would induce a massive holdout problem, slow 5G deployment to a crawl, and violate the Communications Act's requirements for incentive auctions to be both voluntary and among competing bidders. Now, T-Mobile has responded with a revised alternative that invites C-Band earth station operators to compete with satellite operators in an incentive auction to clear between 300-500 MHz of C-Band spectrum (the 'New Proposal'). But this shiny substitute is fool's gold: The Communications Act does not permit earth station registrants to participate in an incentive auction. Even if it did, the fundamental issues of its Original Proposal remain. Including more than 17,000 earth stations in 416 separate PEA auctions with 416 different sets of participants would exacerbate the holdout problem and add insurmountable complexity and delay.