39GHz - Auction 103 Reconfiguration Analysis - Number Blocks Tue, Mar 26, 2019

On March 21st, the FCC released a Notice of Procedures describing how existing 39GHz spectrum ownership below will be remapped to the new 39GHz configuration.  We thought it would be beneficial to see how the FCC arrived at their results.

Current Configuration:

Future Configuration:

The procedures the FCC announced will provide a route for the existing 39GHz owners to essentially trade-in their spectrum for vouchers that can be used in Auction 103.  The FCC published a summary of the aggregated holdings data for each of the 39GHz licensees so we decided to use the data from our Millimeter Wave - Spectrum Ownership Analysis Tool to show the underlying calculations.

We are able to use the data from our Millimeter Wave - Spectrum Ownership Analysis Tool to determine the aggregate MHz-POPs value for PEA003 (Chicago).  To find the aggregate MHz-POPs we must first find the MHz-POPs contribution for each of AT&T's licenses (call signs) in the Chicago market.  Below are each of the county MHz-POPs components for each call sign.  We have indicated whether the license covers the entire county or whether it is a partial license in the Full/Partial County column.  The county MHz-POPs component is found by multiplying the bandwidth for each call sign by the county population.  The total aggregate MHz-POPs is the sum of the county MHz-POPs for all of AT&T's licenses.  Using this process, we have found AT&T's aggregate MHz-POPs to by 2,817,188,800 compared to the FCC's results of 2,815,434,000.

The Market MHz-POPs value is found by multiplying the new 39GHz channel size (100MHz) by the total population of the Chicago PEA.  

The next calculation provides the number of blocks that AT&T is authorized to receive in the 39GHz auction by relinquishing their current licenses.  Our analysis indicates that AT&T will start with slightly more than 3 - 100MHz channel blocks in Chicago before the auction starts.