Fair warning from Sprint: We can’t buy 800 MHz spectrum we just returned to the FCC

As 800 MHz rebanding is completed in a region, most of the spectrum returned by Sprint in the band is prioritized for use by public-safety and critical-infrastructure entities. However, in the guard band from 861 MHz to 862 MHz, the frequencies are available to the business-industrial market on a first-come, first-served basis.

The FCC has granted licenses to many of these channels in various parts of the country. And, in many cases, those licensees or their spectrum brokers have turned around quickly and offered to sell the licenses back to Sprint, according to Bill Jenkins, Sprint’s vice president of spectrum management.

“I get a couple of calls per week from licensees that want to sell me spectrum,” Jenkins said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications at the EWA/USMSS Wireless Leadership Summit in Denver. “A lot of times, the ink is not dry on the license when I get the phone call. I have gotten phone calls on licenses that have been granted within two weeks of the phone call.

“Most of the calls that I am getting are in the 800 MHz band. They are channels below 862 MHz that were released by the commission [FCC] for licensing.”

And the sources of the calls are new to Jenkins, who is a veteran of the wireless-spectrum industry.

“I have been in this business for 17 years, and I’ve never done business with any of them—not that I recall, anyway. I cannot say that they don’t have systems operating,” he said. “I don’t know them, because I’ve never dealt with them before.”

On the surface, calling Sprint to gauge the carrier’s interest in the spectrum makes some sense. After all, Sprint has a contiguous 14 MHz block adjacent to the guard band, so some might consider it logical for the carrier to want to increase its spectrum position as it tries to compete with giants like AT&T and Verizon, which hold licenses on at least 20 MHz of contiguous spectrum in the 700 MHz band to support their respective LTE networks.

But whether Sprint should be interested in the spectrum is a moot point, because the carrier simply is not allowed to consider regaining the guard-band frequencies as a condition of the FCC report and order that launched 800 MHz rebanding more than a decade ago, according to Jenkins.

“Sprint is forbidden from holding channels between 851 MHz and 862 MHz,” Jenkins said. “If you are a licensee that has—or plans to apply for—channels in this part of the band, you should not do so with the intention of selling the channels to Sprint.

“If I bought it, I’d have to turn around and give it back to the commission.”

Jenkins acknowledges that there was a time when he might have been interested in some of the licenses being offered—more than a decade ago, when he worked for Nextel Communications, which set the 800 MHz spectrum market by acquiring channels as its consumer popularity rose prior to the carrier being sold to Sprint.

Even if Sprint desired the spectrum and legally could acquire it, there are issues with many of the licenses being offered. In a broadband-dominated world where carriers are hungry for contiguous spectrum of 2 MHz or more in capacity-constrained metropolitan markets, many of the licenses being offered are site-specific licenses for just one or two channels, Jenkins said.

And there is another legal problem with the licenses being offered to Sprint, Jenkins noted

“The licensees that are calling me are trying to sell channels, not systems,” he said.