FCC 700 MHz Spectrum Auction Areas

This week I've written about the upcoming Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 700 MHz auction and how the available spectrum is the result of a Congressional law passed in 2005. The law requires U.S. TV stations to convert to all digital broadcasts and give up analog spectrum in the 700 MHz frequency band. Today let's look at how the FCC is using area definitions to determine the spectrum blocks that will be auctioned.

With the definition of Cellular Market Areas in 1982, the FCC started assigning licensing areas based radio licenses, . According to the FCC, a common trait among most of these licensing areas is that every area is an aggregation of county-equivalent entities as defined in Federal Information Processing Standards Publication 6-4, 1990 August 31 . These data resource standards have bee put in place to avoid unnecessary duplication and incompatibilities in the collection, processing, and dissemination of data, so they make a lot of sense.

Each spectrum block in the 700 MHz auction, except for the national public safely D-Block, has been assigned an area designation by the FCC. Let's describe those areas included in the 700 MHz auction using FCC definitions.

Economic Areas

Both the A-Block (12 MHz) and the E-Block (6 MHz) are being auctioned using the Economic Area (BEA) service areas established by the Regional Economic Analysis Division, Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce. Included are Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Gulf of Mexico. There are a total of 176 Economic Area service areas designated by the FCC.

BEA services include General Wireless Communications Service (GWCS), Specialized Mobile Radio (SMR) and Location and Monitoring Service (LMS).

Cellular Market Areas

The B-Block (12 MHz) is being auctioned using the Cellular Market Area (CMA) service areas. The 734 CMAs are broken down as follows:

Areas 1-305: Created from the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) defined by the Office of Management and Budget (1-305)

Area 306: The Gulf of Mexico
Areas 307-734: Rural Service Areas (RSAs) established by the FCC which do not cross state borders including parts of Puerto Rico not already in an MSA (723-729), U.S. Virgin Islands
(730-731), Guam (732), American Samoa (733), and Northern Mariana Islands (734).

CMA Services include Cellular Radiotelephone Service and Interactive Video and Data Service (IVDS)

Regional Economic Areas

The C-Block (22 MHz) is being auctioned using the 12 Regional Economic Areas (REAs) created by the FCC. The REAs are an aggregation of the 52 Major Economic Areas (MEAs) defined by the FCC.

REA Services include Wireless Communications Service (WCS)

All FCC areas, along with names, county lists, maps and map info data can be found on the Commission's website linked here.