Sprint has decided not to participate in the FCC's big spectrum auction next year.
"Sprint's focus and overarching imperative must be on improving its network and market position in the immediate term so we can remain a powerful force in fostering competition, consumer benefits and innovation in the wireless broadband world," Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said in a statement. "Sprint has the spectrum it needs to deploy its network architecture of the future."
The auction will allow broadcasters to sell their unused spectrum to mobile carriers, and get a cut of the purchase price. Already moved from 2014 to 2015, a legal challenge last fall pushed the event into 2016.
Spectrum allocation might seem like a boring topic, but with more and more people picking up bandwidth-intensive gadgets, carriers need spectrum to support them. Without it, you could see a lot of buffering and dropped connections.
One of the big concerns from smaller carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile going into this auction, though, was whether their larger rivals, Verizon and AT&T, would use their sizable war chests to snap up all the desirable spectrum. Last year, there were reports that Sprint and T-Mobile would pool their assets and jointly bid on spectrum (but only if their now-failed merger bid was still in play). The FCC put the smackdown on that, and T-Mobile independently pushed for auction limits. The agency agreed to some restrictions—it set aside 30 megahertz of spectrum per market for smaller companies—but did not give T-Mobile everything it wanted.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted yesterday that Sprint is "crazy to sit out this historic auction." T-Mobile "is going to go hard in this low-band spectrum auction and put that spectrum to good use for our customers."
The last major spectrum auction of this nature was in 2008, when AT&T and Verizon were the big winners. Verizon has said it does not need any more huge blocks of spectrum, though recent reports suggest the company is weighing a lease of spectrum held by Dish.