EBS Auction Inventory June 15, 2021 20:30

On January 1, 2021 the FCC announced the license inventory for the EBS Whitespace Auction.  On May 17th, the FCC announced an extension to the Auction comment period due to a series of filings outlining issues with the initial inventory list and the complex process to calculate the whitespace license areas.

In this post, we will compare the auction inventory with our EBS Auction Tool and accompanying maps.

Below is the inventory data that the FCC provided for the 1st Auction Channel in  Douglas County, NV.  Douglas County is just south of Reno, NV.

This FCC data would lead a carrier to believe that a 49.5MHz channel covering 46,997 people could be purchased during Auction 108.  From the image below, Channel 1 is a composite of nine currently licensed channels.  To determine the number of people (POPS) that the 1st Channel covers, requires evaluating the licensed areas for each of these 9 sub channels.

Let's first look at the licensed area for the A1 channel surrounding Douglas County.  From the image below, only the southern point of Douglas County is not currently licensed, thus that area and its population would be available if a carrier purchased the 1st Auction channel for Douglas County. 

EBS A1 License Area:

The available whitespace for the A1 channel can be seen below from our Web Spectrum Viewer - EBS Auction subscription.

EBS A1 Whitespace Area:

Next we will look at the A2 channel which has a different license area than the A1 channel, thus a different (and larger) whitespace area.

EBS A2 License Area:

EBS A2 Whitespace Area:

Our last example will be the B2 channel which has the most whitespace area for any of the Douglas County sub channels.

EBS B2 Whitespace Area:

The geographic areas that can be purchased are important so you can visualize the areas that you can serve, but the population available in each of these whitespace areas is necessary to calculate the economic opportunity for each license, thus its value. 

Our EBS Auction Opportunities Tool calculates the population available in each of the whitespace areas for each auction channel.  The value on the far right of this table represents the total MHz-POPs available. 

Population View: 

The FCC's inventory indicates that there are 2,326,352 MHzPOPs for auction in this channel but there are on 344,398 MHzPOPs available, 15% of the FCC's value.

In the EBS Auction Opportunities Tool we also display the same data in a population percentage view, where the available population can be seen as a percentage of the county population.

Population % View: