New Street: Too Much Spectrum Auctioned, Too Soon?

Wireless investors have big concerns, starting with risk of “more spectrum coming to the market too soon,” New Street’s Blair Levin wrote investors. “The wireless industry will, within a short time, have spent well over $100 billion" in two auctions to buy licenses, he said this weekend: “They now must spend tens of billions more to deploy networks to take advantage of that spectrum. As a practical political matter, they always argue that they need more spectrum. As a practical economic matter, they don’t want any new big auctions for several years, at the earliest.” Another concern is DOD “controlling the spectrum process and keeping spectrum from coming to market for too long (and when it arrives, having the spectrum come through a shared, rather than exclusive, framework)," he said: Investors fear that concerns over C-band interference with altimeters, an issue being raised by the FAA (see 2110290065), “may delay 5G services.”