What the 2012 Spectrum Auction Was Actually About

In the spring of 2012, approximately forty megahertz of the 700 MHz band changed hands in a proceeding the public was told to think of as routine. It was not routine. I sat in a telecom boardroom that summer watching my colleagues toast to the outcome, and the toast was louder than any toast I heard at that company before or after.

The public records of the auction are available, if you know where to look, and if you read the fine print instead of the press releases. What the records show — and what the press releases do not — is that the acquired spectrum was reclassified within six months of purchase, placed into a service category that did not exist before the auction was announced.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am a recovering telecom insider. There is a difference. A conspiracy theorist believes there is a plan. I believe there was a series of ordinary decisions, made by ordinary people, each of which looked reasonable in isolation and which together resulted in the wholesale reclassification of a public resource as a private one.

What was lost in 2012 was not just forty megahertz. It was the last meaningful block of wild-growing signal in the lower bands. The co-op's northwest pasture sits on a sliver of that band that the FCC, in a rare lapse of thoroughness, failed to claim in the auction. We have held it ever since, quietly, and we do not publicize the exact coordinates.

Members sometimes ask whether the signal they receive from us is "legal." The answer is yes. The signal is harvested from an unclaimed frequency, on land owned by the co-op, distributed to members who have consented to receive it. No law is broken.

Members sometimes ask, more quietly, whether the signal is "authorized." The answer to that is different, and I will not put it in writing. Come to the barn.