T-Mobile buys nearly all the auctioned US 2.5 GHz spectrum

The recent US 2.5 GHz spectrum auction didn’t bring in much money by historical standards, probably because there was only one significant participant.

Scott Bicheno

September 5, 2022

2 Min Read
T-Mobile buys nearly all the auctioned US 2.5 GHz spectrum

The recent US 2.5 GHz spectrum auction didn’t bring in much money by historical standards, probably because there was only one significant participant.

Over 8,000 country-based licenses, covering mostly rural parts of the US, were on offer and T-Mobile won 7,156 of the 7,872 that were sold – around 91%. Of the remaining winners, over three quarters of them were described in the FCC announcement as small businesses or as entities serving rural communities.

TMUS’s dominance of this auction doesn’t come as any great surprise since it’s the only major American MNO to have already put some effort into that band. In fact, it seems safe to assume its competitors only took part to try to keep TMUS honest and make sure it didn’t get too much of a bargain. If so, they seem to have failed, as the $427 million trousered by the government is well below even the lowest analyst expectations.

In an amusing potential twist, Light Reading reports that Verizon may have ended up winning $1.5 million worth of 2.5 GHz spectrum by accident. Since the spectrum is useless to Verizon, the assumption is that it tried to get cute by bidding on some licenses on the assumption that TMUS would be forced to come back with a higher one. Verizon seems to have had its bluff called a few to times, which must have lead to awkward internal discussions.

Here are the tables summarising the top five bidders:

 

Bidder

Total Gross Winning Bids

T-Mobile License LLC

$304,325,290

PTI Pacifica Inc.

$17,690,000

TeleGuam Holdings, LLC

$16,565,000

Evergy Kansas Central

$12,744,400

Cellular South Licenses, LLC

$11,861,300

 

Bidder

Number of Licenses Won

T-Mobile License LLC

7,156

North American Catholic Educational Programming Foundation

107

Evergy Kansas Central

54

LICT Wireless Broadband Company, LLC

46

Broadband One of the Midwest, Inc.

42

 

About the Author

Scott Bicheno

As the Editorial Director of Telecoms.com, Scott oversees all editorial activity on the site and also manages the Telecoms.com Intelligence arm, which focuses on analysis and bespoke content.
Scott has been covering the mobile phone and broader technology industries for over ten years. Prior to Telecoms.com Scott was the primary smartphone specialist at industry analyst Strategy Analytics’. Before that Scott was a technology journalist, covering the PC and telecoms sectors from a business perspective.
Follow him @scottbicheno

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