The FCC has made its first move to speed up the 3.45 GHz midband spectrum auction.
On Tuesday (Oct. 12), the FCC signaled it is adding a fourth, one-hour, round per day to goose the process.
There had been three, hour rounds per, day.
After round 12, bids totaled $1,571,803,600. The auction launched Oct. 5 with a reserve price of $14,775,354,330. That is the bid total the FCC will need to close the auction successfully because it will cost about that much to clear the spectrum for use.
Also Read: FCC Opens 3.45 GHz Band for 5G flexibility
The Department of Defense is the primary user of the band for military systems (like key radar applications), but identified 100 MHz of the spectrum that it could share with commercial users so long as they protect against harmful interference.
The FCC is auctioning the 100 MHz spectrum in 10 MHz spectrum blocks--as commissioner Geoffrey Starks had advocated--with a 40 MHz limit on how much any one bidder can acquire in a single partial economic area (PEA). Cable operators had argued that using those larger PEAs would result in less than robust participation in the auction by competitors to the big telecoms and had asked the FCC to reconsider that proposal.
