Spectrum Bridge, an online brokerage for buying and selling licensed wireless spectrum, announced this week that the South Carolina Educational Broadband Service Commission has selected the company to assist in marketing the state’s 2.5 GHz wireless spectrum.
South Carolina wants to attract lessees for their excess spectrum assets and is offering a statewide portfolio of 2.5 GHz licenses. The spectrum can support “4G” technologies like WiMAX and LTE and the state hopes to attract enterprises, government agencies, utilities and others who wish to deploy high-performance private wireless networks for voice, video and broadband data applications.
The South Carolina RFP (pdf), is being enhanced via interactive spectrum-mapping technology developed by Spectrum Bridge for its SpecEx online spectrum marketplace. All licenses available from the Commission via the RFP can be researched, and customized views can be created, via a dedicated page on the SpecEx.com website.
The size of South Carolina’s offering – in terms of both statewide coverage and bandwidth – provides a unique opportunity for new and innovative business models. By going through a broker like Spectrum Bridge, the state can make available 1596 MHz of EBS spectrum for lease.
Spectrum Bridge (about, blog and faq), has approval from the FCC and has 27 employees. It has previously raised $10 million in funding. Their SpecEx on-line brokerage provides a common platform, a fixed set of trading rules, and standardized agreements.
South Carolina’s seven-person Commission was created to obtain and evaluate proposals from commercial entities for leasing South Carolina’s State-owned spectrum. Responses to the RFP are due on February 16, 2009. A link to the official RFP, interactive map and other resources can be found on spectrumbridge.com.
By May 1, 2011, EBS spectrum holders must prove to the FCC they’re using the waves for the public good, explains Xchange Magazine. These holders tend to be large institutions including colleges, universities, states and the Roman Catholic church.
The lease holders don’t want to offer services themselves because even doing the minimum to meet FCC requirements could cost $1 million, said Rick Rotondo, chief marketing officer of Spectrum Bridge, a company that helps parties buy and sell spectrum. The FCC allows EBS spectrum holders to sublet their licenses not only to service providers but also to entities such as municipalities and enterprises; those parties then could construct their own broadband networks.
DigitalBridge Communications, for example, reportedly has its eye on South Carolina. The goal, said DigitalBridge CEO Kelley Dunne, “is to expand coverage throughout the state and not just focus on the larger markets.”
EBS got its start 45 years ago (pdf), when the FCC, responding to Congressional pressure, set aside a large amount of spectrum at 2.5 GHz for schools and universities to beam instructional television programming such as lectures, to students. The FCC named the service Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS). Clearwire leases ITFS from the nonprofit license holder in many US cities.
