More recent news that super irks me, T-Mobile bought a bunch of mmWave spectrum promising to deploy into it, and now are like, oh, sorry it would be expensive to actually meet the requirements & deploy to all this area; can we only take the good areas we want & give up the spectrum everywhere else?
Ok so maybe someone might bite maybe but seems so so unlikely if they can't use the spectrum in any popular spaces!
Structurally this spectrum auction had these conditions, these requirements to deploy broadly, for very obvious reasons. T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting. They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this.
> They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this.
I've been saying this for years about DISH, they sat on nationwide mid-band AWS spectrum for something like a decade with only a single tower built in Colorado. They only started a network buildout after T-Mobile was forced to make concessions during Sprint merger. This is super useful/valuable spectrum in the 1.6/2.1ghz range, and it was just wasted. They also bid on 600mhz licenses they couldn't use and acted like the good guys when they leased it to other carriers during COVID.
The BRS/EBS (2.5ghz, band 41) spectrum was similarly a mess. The government gave tons of it to schools and nonprofits that would never use it, never had a need for it. They turned around and started their own market to license it out to companies that actually deployed it for LTE and 5G. In my area T-Mobile deployed more of this spectrum than the backhaul can even deliver. I can easily hit 1.4gbps between a few towers, 700mbps off a single tower (because that's the theoretical max after overhead on a 1gbps port). It's possible there's an argument to be made they were hoarding this, but they built it out, it's on-air and usable.
> T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting.
mmwave spectrum is just.... not that valuable? From a physics perspective it's blocked by too much and requires too much density to get effective deployment. They had a prior history of deploying tons of it, just not on the panels, they deployed it as radio backhaul between the towers in areas where fiber wasn't available. This spectrum should probably get light-licensed/flex-licensed because it's only really going to be needed/used in the most dense urban areas and for radio backhaul in challenging terrain.
I think the Trump people were pushing it to “beat China” or something.
In my area, Verizon used some pandemic emergency order to drop mmWave poles all over the place, including in the middle of sidewalks and within a few feet of existing poles. They did it at a frenzy pace, and to date haven’t turned any of them on.
Multiple ISPs bid purely to obstuct other parties from development. It's a chess move for a large business to maintain the status quo. I do agree that financial penalties are the only counter move.
Ok so maybe someone might bite maybe but seems so so unlikely if they can't use the spectrum in any popular spaces!
Structurally this spectrum auction had these conditions, these requirements to deploy broadly, for very obvious reasons. T-Mobile shafting the American public super hard with this non-delivery is so insulting. They should lose the license & pay a fine, fuck this.
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/t-mobile-relinquishes-mmwave...