New EBS Whitespace Auction Licenses Tue, Jan 31, 2023

On December 1, 2022 the FCC began granting the new EBS licenses to the winning bidders from Auction 108. Since many of these licenses are not for complete counties or for the entire auction channel size, I thought it would be useful to see how these licenses appear on the FCC licensing system.

For an example, I have chosen the first auction channel (C1) for Iowa county, Wisconsin, which was purchased by Michigan Wireless.

The map for this license shows all of Iowa county highlighted and all of the C1 frequencies highlighted as well. (If the images are too small to read all of the details, right click on the image and select <Open image in new tab>.

Now looking at the market tab, we will focus on the information at the bottom of the screen. First, all of the 9 component channels (A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3) are listed above the county with a full county population value. This would indicate that this license is authorized to cover all 23,687 people living in Iowa county, WI.

Looking back at our outputs from the EBS Whitespace Auction Tool, we can see that representing this license as a complete county license for all of the component channels is not correct.

In our Population Percentage output, it is clear that Michigan Wireless did not purchase the rights to use the B1, B2, and B2 component channels because they were leased to T-Mobile through their lease with the State of Wisconsin -Educational Communications Board. It is also clear that 3% of the county's population cannot be covered with the A1, A2, and A3 component channels.

To see these numbers as raw population values, we will look at our Population output. In this view you can see the population that is licensed for each component channel and the only channels that cover the complete county population are the C1, C2, and C3 channels.