The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division reignited spectrum policy debates with its statement approving T-Mobile’s purchase of UScellular’s wireless operations. The real headline wasn’t the approval itself, even despite the unrelated conditions layered on, but rather the DOJ’s pointed warning to the nation’s three national cellular carriers—a clear signal of concern over “continued spectrum aggregation by the Big 3.”
This unusually strong language—issued just days after Congress restored the FCC’s spectrum auction authority via the Reconciliation Bill—could significantly influence how future auctions unfold. The bill mandates 800 MHz of new spectrum for full-power commercial use, but which bands will be repurposed remains uncertain. The FCC and NTIA’s decisions on this key question will either mitigate or exacerbate the mobile market aggregation the DOJ just flagged.
Rather than rushing ahead to the usual Washington parlor game of winners and losers, DOJ’s entry into the debate invites stepping back and returning to first principles: How should the federal government allocate scarce spectrum to best promote competition, investment, and innovation?
Start with the facts. As the DOJ noted, the so called “Big 3” control over 80% of commercial spectrum licenses and 90% of the mobile service market. The 2019 Sprint/T-Mobile merger was approved on the condition that a fourth national competitor would emerge, but Dish/Echostar has failed, so far, to fill that role. DOJ’s antitrust watchdogs are right to highlight these objective facts.
While Dish has underperformed, cable providers have quietly become the only credible challengers to the three carriers’ position. Cable’s mobile offerings rely on MVNO agreements for wholesale access to cellular networks, but they offload about 90% of mobile traffic to their own Wi-Fi and CBRS networks. This hybrid model—which allows for lower consumer prices—has proven effective: cable providers now collectively serve over 19 million mobile lines and captured 18% of gross line additions last quarter.
However, this model depends on continued access to two key spectrum bands: the CBRS shared-use band (3.55–3.7 GHz) and the 6 GHz unlicensed band (5.9–7.125 GHz). Both were allocated to their current uses by the first Trump FCC, with broad support from the tech sector.
The Reconciliation Bill may have revived the cell carriers’ hopes of reallocating and auctioning these prime spectrum bands for their own exclusive use—but the DOJ’s statement has likely poured cold water on those expectations. If the Trump administration is this concerned about extreme concentration in the mobile market, it’s hard to imagine the FCC undermining the incumbents’ only viable competitors by taking away CBRS and 6 GHz spectrum.
To be fair, there’s also another, adjacent market to consider: fixed broadband. There, the roles are reversed: cable providers lead with about 60% of residential connections, but their market share (and stock prices) are taking a beating from the three-headed hydra of fiber overbuilders, satellite providers like Starlink, and the cellular carriers’ fixed wireless access (FWA) offerings. Those carriers argue that cable’s opposition to reallocating CBRS and 6 GHz is a self-serving attempt to blunt FWA’s competitive threat.
But on balance, the competitive case for reallocating these bands is weak. For one, cellular executives keep telling investors they already have ample spectrum to support years of further growth. FWA isn’t going anywhere.
More importantly, the fixed broadband market—now a four-way race among cable, fiber, satellites, and FWA—is already far more competitive than the mobile market, where just three firms together hold 90% market share. If regulators view this debate as a zero-sum choice between promoting competition in mobile versus fixed broadband, that answer should be a no-brainer.
Of course, the FCC will weigh many factors beyond competition in deciding which bands to auction. But the DOJ’s intervention signals that the Trump Administration is watching market power closely. That’s welcome news for the broad coalition of tech and telecom stakeholders working to preserve CBRS and 6 GHz for open, competitive use.
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