Trump's budget bill opens wide swath of spectrum for sale A provision in the new US budget bill opens a wide swath of spectrum for sale, including some that overlaps with frequencies currently allotted for private mobile networks and Wi-Fi 6E. The budget reconciliation bill, which President Trump signed into law on July 4 as planned, has a section that gives the Federal …
Certainly not for 5G.
How about we wait until there's a real need for additional spectrum and we take a targeted approach to this?
Nevermind I forgot I'm talking about an administration with an average IQ in the low 80s. Trump doesn't care if the US doesn't get much money for spectrum that companies don't have much use for today, rather than waiting until there's a real need for it and it drives up the price by an order of magnitude or two. He's probably acting on instructions from his billionaire swamp palace members, who want to transfer all publicly owned US assets like land and even spectrum into private hands.
Plus we should NEVER sell spectrum. It should be rented in one or two decade long terms depending on the use case. Otherwise you'll see private equity bidding if the demand is low enough, hoping to hold it for a decade and wait until it is worth more - when THEY will rent it and derive the long term income the US government should have received.
It is amazing how at almost every turn, Trump and his band of MAGA morons make the worst possible decisions.
"Plus we should NEVER sell spectrum. It should be rented in one or two decade long terms depending on the use case."
This.
Use it or lose it. or, more accurately, buy only what you need. Right now, the telecoms can't sell all the bandwidth that they have to their own customers. Hence, the growth of the MVNO market, who buys it from the network operators wholesale. Since the MVNOs don't have the huge sunk costs of paying for these huge blocks of spectrum up front, they are more nimble as far as pricing and offering different features. The network operators can only dream of this kind of financial flexibility, had their plan not been to grab up all the bandwidth and force private services onto their cellular networks. I shed no tears for them.
Frequencies are normally auctioned as licences for specific periods of time and I'd be surprised if this were different this time. Though knowing Trump, maybe he's planning to sell certain frequencies permanently for the new "phone service".
Another issue is going to be interoperability. We're already seeing problems with the cavalier way in which the US often allocates frequencies for commercial or unrestricted use that other countries, often sensibly restrict.
