AT&T Purchases FLO Spectrum from Qualcomm

ygbhen said:
Tmobile should have been all over this one. This would have gave them spectrum to cover all the major metro areas and then some.

No. Unless T-Mobile were to deploy TDD LTE (while nearly all other carriers deploy FDD LTE), the Lower 700 MHz D & E licenses that AT&T is acquiring from Qualcomm would be worthless to T-Mobile. To understand, view the Lower 700 MHz band plan:

http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/data/bandplans/700l ... »

The Lower 700 MHz D & E blocks are unpaired. Compare them to the Lower 700 MHz A, B, and C blocks -- note how those blocks consist of paired spectrum.

In paired spectrum, the uplink (mobile -> base station) operates in the lower frequency half of the block, the downlink (base station -> mobile) in the higher frequency half. This is called Frequency Division Duplex (FDD), since the uplink & downlink are divided by frequency. Nearly all currently deployed cellular technologies -- CDMA, GSM, EV-DO, W-CDMA -- operate in FDD configuration, as opposed to Time Division Duplex (TDD), in which the uplink & downlink share the same spectrum but are divided into time slots.

Background info aside, AT&T has numerous Lower 700 MHz B & C licenses that it acquired via purchase of other license holders or at FCC auction several years ago. AT&T will use these licenses to deploy FDD LTE. Additionally, FDD LTE allows for downlink aggregation. In other words, one uplink can be paired w/ two downlinks. So, AT&T will use the Lower 700 MHz D & E blocks that it is acquiring from Qualcomm as supplemental downlinks.

T-Mobile, on the other hand, has no paired Lower 700 MHz spectrum. So, the unpaired Lower 700 MHz spectrum from Qualcomm would be of no use to T-Mobile for FDD LTE.

Does that make sense?

AJ