Phone Scoop has an excellent Visual Guide to AWS (Advanced Wireless Services) band with charts on the spectrum and maps of coverage areas that the bidders won in the $14 billion dollar auction that concluded last month.
Although US carriers are allowed to launch “3G” technology in the existing “2G” bands, (and most have already done so,) the existing spectrum wasn’t enough to handle everything carriers needed and wanted to do.
The same is true in Europe, where they recently addressed the spectrum shortage by auctioning off spectrum in what’s generally called the “2100″ band. (It’s actually in both the 2100 and 1900 bands, but again, we’ll get to that later.)
The FCC wanted to harmonize its “new” AWS spectrum with Europe’s UMTS 2100 band, since both would be used for new “3G” phone service. Unfortunately, as you can see above, the lower half of Europe’s UMTS 2100 band almost completely overlaps with our PCS band, so complete harmonization wasn’t an option.
However, given the circumstances, the FCC did do a pretty good job of harmonizing AWS with the rest of the world. The upper part does line up perfectly with Europe’s UMTS 2100 band, and the lower part does line up with Europe’s DCS band. Therefore manufacturers already building GSM+WCDMA “world phones” actually won’t have to support any additional frequency bands at all.
The FCC sold some 1,100 individual licenses. They came in three different geographical sizes:
- A block licenses are divided into 734 Cellular Market Areas (CMA), the smallest geographic coverage areas.
- B and C blocks are divided into 176 EAs (Economic Areas), medium size areas, bigger than multiple counties.
- D, E and F blocks are divided into 12 REAGs (Regional Economic Area Groupings), that are nearly as large as time zones. Six main REAGs cover the whole continental US. Other REAGs cover Alaska and Hawaii.
T-Mobile’s new AWS licenses cover the whole country. T-Mobile bought the REAG (regional) D-F blocks. T-Mobile tried to get the coveted 20 MHz F block where they could, but were out-bid by others in many regions.
SpectrumCo, Sprint’s joint venture with the major cable companies (including Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox), picked up 20 MHz licenses in the B block covering most of the populated areas of the continental US.
With the exception of Hawaii, all of SpectrumCo’s AWS spectrum is in one block. It could make it easier for hardware manufacturers to create radios and antennas for just that one very specific frequency band.
Many additional coverage and spectrum maps are available at PhoneScoop.
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