Earlier this week, Verizon had announced that it planned to sell off all of its 700 MHz A and B spectrum licenses to rationalize its spectrum holdings. Of course, this sell hinged on the FCC’s approval of its acquisition of AWS spectrum it had attained from a consortium of cable operators, that includes Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Well, it turns out that 700 MHz frequency band holding the A and B spectrum the company is trying to dangle out isn’t worth much — tricky Verizon.
The 700 MHz A and B spectrum licenses are of “lower-quality,” and would be useless for other larger wireless carriers to obtain with LTE 4G network aspirations. There are a couple of reasons why these blocks of spectrum is almost unusable for an LTE network. One, this spectrum was once used for broadcast TV, and because of that, the licenses in the A block are likely to still interfere with TV channel 51. Two, the A and B blocks are relatively small and they only cover small metro regions.
To be brief, Verizon is trying to pull one over on the FCC, which will probably cause their deal to end up failing miserably. None of the major wireless providers will buy this spectrum, so there efforts will go all for naught. Watching congress grill execs from VZ and Comcast convinced me that this deal had no chance — I’m still unconvinced.
For more information on A and B spectrum, head over to cnet.