With three rounds completed in the FCC's auction of 28 GHz spectrum for 5G, there are 2,078 county-sized licenses with provisionally winning bids (PWBs)--out of 3,072 available--totaling $47,759,960 in bids.
That is compared with 2,065 licenses with provisionally winning bids (PWBs) totaling $41,693,960 in bids in round two.
The FCC launched the auction Wednesday (Nov. 15) with two, two-hour rounds per day.
The FCC does not identify who is bidding for which licenses, only the amount bid and the new bid amount, if any, as the auction continues.
The aggregate minimum bid over all licenses is about $40 million, but even with the round-three total exceeding that, there could still be bids that have not met their license minimums in some areas, while in others the bids have pushed past the minimums.
PWBs are ones that have met the minimum for those individual licenses, which the FCC is setting relatively low to get the spectrum into the hands of those who will build out the next generation of super-fast wireless. In turn, that will both help close the rural broadband divide--many of the licenses are in rural areas--and boost competition to fixed broadband, both FCC goals.
