Straight Path Communications, a holder of licenses to wireless spectrum, will sell its licenses (useful for coming 5G operations), as part of an agreement with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that settles allegations of fraud on Straight Path’s part. The issue is that Straight Path claimed facilities were deployed which were not actually in place to support use of its spectrum. Typically, spectrum licenses are granted--or withdrawn--if license holders do not create networks to allow use of those assets.
As part of the settlement, Straight Path will pay $15 million to the FCC and give the regulator a 20 percent cut of any sale of its spectrum licenses.
In July 2016, the FCC made a rule change that allowed for the 28 GHz and 39 GHz bands, a major part of Straight Path's spectrum holdings, to be used in mobile communications.
If Straight Path does not announce the sale of its spectrum licenses in the next 12 months, it will have to pay the FCC $85 million or return its licenses.
Consider (just visually) what the use of millimeter wave frequencies could mean. On this chart, the total available mobile frequencies below 3 GHz are shown on the far left end of the scale, with a rough visual indication of capacity shown by the width of the bars.
All the new millimeter wave spectrum (generally, 6 GHz up to about 90 GHz), is shown to the right of the current mobile spectrum allocations. In the near term, spectrum up to about 40 GHZ is what service providers are looking at, for closer term end user deployment. Most of the higher-frequency millimeter band is generally restricted, at the moment to backhaul operations, point-to-point.
No comments:
Post a Comment