The National Telecommunications and Information Administration – which manages the government’s airwaves – and the Federal Communications Commission have backed the idea of spectrum sharing as a way of balancing the mobile industry’s hunger for new bandwidth with the government’s own communications needs.

The idea is that federal users would be prioritized over the shared airwaves, but whenever and wherever there are no government transmissions present, commercial users would have free reign to operate their devices and networks. For instance, satellite communications bands might be off-limits for commercial use in and near military installations, but open to operators everywhere else.

The NTIA has specifically identified 95 MHz in 1755-1850 MHz band for potential shared use. The President’s plan singled out not only that band but three other swathes of spectrum below 6 GHz as the first targets for shared spectrum trials (1695-1710 MHz, 5350-5470 and 5850-5925 MHz). In a memorandum, Obama ordered federal agencies to begin working directly with operators and other industry players to test the feasibility of sharing in other government bands, and it set aside $83 million in funds for spectrum sharing research grants and contracts.

The NTIA now has six months to create an inventory of all federal airwaves that could be tapped for sharing and to develop a plan with the industry to test whether sharing in those bands would be feasible.

The mobile industry has tentatively backed the government’s sharing proposals, though it’s been ambivalent to the idea in the past. Mobile carrier association CTIA issued a statement praising the President’s effort to make more spectrum available for industry use, but had little to say about the sharing proposal itself.

Comcast, however, lauded every aspect of the plan. As a cable operator its primary interest in spectrum is for the nationwide Wi-Fi network its building with its cable peers, and unlicensed technologies such as Wi-Fi would benefit most from such sharing models.

“Spectrum sharing is the cornerstone of unlicensed services such as Wi-Fi, and we look forward to working closely with federal agencies to realize the economic and social benefits that gigabit Wi-Fi can deliver,” Comcast VP Government Communications Sena Fitzmaurice said in a statement.

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Citing two unnamed sources, Reuters claimed SoftBank would prefer to close the Sprint deal, putting control of the company in the Japanese carrier’s hands, but if that fails SoftBank is ready to turn attentions to the newly minted T-Mobile. Just two months ago T-Mobile was a wholly owned subsidy of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, but in May it bought up MetroPCS and its NYSE ticker, becoming a publicly traded company. Reuters’ sources said SoftBank has already held several discussions with DT about buying a T-Mobile US stake, and those talks have intensified in recent weeks.

The Sprint-SoftBank is already well along its way to getting the final regulatory approvals. It’s gotten the okay from U.S. national security and antitrust authorities, and now only waits for the Federal Communications Commission’s final public interest review. SoftBank would have to start that process all over again if it turned its attention to T-Mobile.

T-Mobile — besides being a smaller prize — doesn’t have Sprint’s huge spectrum interests. Sprint is the majority investor in Clearwire and its nationwide treasure trove of 2.5 GHz airwaves. Sprint is trying to take over Clearwire ahead of the SoftBank deal, which would give SoftBank the spectrum basis for a massive U.S. LTE deployment.

But there are some benefits to abandoning the Sprint deal if Wednesday’s vote doesn’t go SoftBank’s way. According to Reuters, SoftBank could walk away from the deal with $5 billion in break-up fees, currency hedging gains and sales of the Sprint stock it has already purchased. Plus, Dish is challenging Sprint’s bid for Clearwire as well, which would complicate any SoftBank plans to use its spectrum.

Image courtesy Flickr user Mavis.

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T-Mobile, though, has been short on specifics, so far keeping mum on what particular tweaks it plans to make that will beat out its rivals. But talking to T-Mobile’s equipment vendors, GigaOM has learned some of those details of its network roadmap. The most impressive upgrade on its list is a plan to blanket its network with extra antennas in order to achieve significant performance gains.

The smart antenna technique is called 4×2 MIMO (shorthand for Multiple Input-Multiple Output) and T-Mobile will be among the first if not the first global operator to implement it. Those of you familiar with 4G probably have already heard of 2X2 MIMO, which is used in all LTE networks today. It sends the same data transmission over parallel paths from two antennas at the tower, which are then picked up by two antennas at the receiver. 4X2 MIMO actually doubles the number of antennas — and thus the number of transmission paths — at the tower while the number of antennas in the device remains the same.

In English, that means there are a lot more signals flying at your smartphone, and there will be a lot more antennas at the tower to pick up your phone’s generally weaker return signals. That increases your chance of getting a decent link at the edge of a cell’s coverage zone where connection speeds tend to trail off. 4X2 MIMO won’t increase the maximum speed of the network beyond its 50-to 75-Mbps theoretical limits, but it will ensure that customers at the fringes of the network get much better connections.

How much better? Nokia Siemens Networks North American head of technology Petri Hautakangas said that in lab trials, T-Mobile and NSN are seeing speed gains at the cell edge as high as 100 percent on the uplink and anywhere from a 50 percent to 60 percent increase in downlink bandwidth. Simple geometry means overall network gains would be big (the further the distance from the tower the more space is covered). The end result is a big boost in the real-world capacity of the cell — it can support more simultaneous connections while making more of those connections faster and more resilient.

The best news is for T-Mobile’s accountants. Implementing 4X2 MIMO on T-Mobile’s network will require simple software upgrades to Ericsson and NSN’s base stations as well the installation and the mounting of new antennas on T-Mobile’s towers – many of which are already in place. Since 4X2 MIMO is already in the baseline LTE standard, most current generation handsets will automatically support the technique.

As for timing, Hautakangas had to be a little cagey when talking about a customer’s rollout plans. “I can say that in less than 12 months we’ll have a commercial 4X2 MIMO network rolled out with a major U.S. operator,” he said during an interview. NSN has only one Tier 1 radio infrastructure customer in the U.S., and that’s T-Mobile.

I talked to T-Mobile VP of radio network engineering Mark McDiarmid, and while he wouldn’t discuss the specifics of T-Mobile’s network blueprint, he did confirm that 4X2 MIMO was one of the multiple LTE and LTE-Advanced technologies T-Mobile was considering for future use.

“We have a very good handle on what 4X2 MIMO can do for us,” McDiarmid said. “And we’re one of the few that are in a position to use it.”

As for other technologies on T-Mobile’s roadmap, both Ericsson and NSN confirmed that their network gear will support the eventual upgrade to carrier aggregation, the first of a long list of LTE-Advanced techniques (though it’s still a far cry from being LTE-Advanced ready as T-Mobile likes to claim).

Carrier aggregation bonds two disparate LTE bands together creating a super-fast connection. T-Mobile already uses carrier aggregation in its HSPA+ network, which is how it achieves 42 Mbps speeds over what is technically a 3G network.

Again McDiarmid wouldn’t comment on T-Mobile’s specific plans, but he said T-Mobile is weighing the use carrier aggregation in two ways. First, it could glue together different parts of its current LTE network in the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) band, giving it bigger channels in markets where it doesn’t have contiguous spectrum. Second, when it launches LTE in the PCS band, it could bind together two completely separate frequency bands, creating the mother of all mobile broadband connections.

T-Mobile image courtesy of Flickr user swruler9284

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PhoneArena has gotten hold of three internal T-Mobile screenshots that show MetroPCS will soon start selling two GSM/HSPA+ phones, the Samsung Galaxy Exhibit and the LG Optimus L9, and that customers will be able to bring unlocked GSM devices such as the iPhone to Metro as well. By virtue of using the global GSM standard, T-Mobile can actually start issuing SIM cards to Metro customers, which is exactly what it appears set to do.

T-Mobile screenshot acquired by PhoneArena

To put this in context, AT&T spent years running two separate network operations — which it called Orange and Blue — after Cingular acquired AT&T Wireless. To be fair, T-Mobile isn’t merging its network with Metro’s. It’s shutting Metro’s CDMA systems down completely, harvesting their spectrum for future T-Mobile’s LTE and HSPA+ networks. T-Mobile, however, plans to maintain the MetroPCS brand for prepaid services, so this move represents more an integration of customer management and billing systems than it does a complete integration of operations.

Still, if PhoneArena’s report proves true, it shows T-Mobile is serious about completing its network overhaul as fast as possible. The faster it gets those MetroPCS customers off of CDMA phones, the sooner it can shut down Metro’s networks.

But there’s a definite benefit for Metro customers as well. They get access to much bigger variety of phones, including devices like the iPhone that were never available to them before. They will have to pay full cost for many of those devices, but since Metro is a prepaid carrier, its customers are already accustomed to paying sticker price. Also, previously every new MetroPCS customer had to buy a new phone when they activated their service. GSM allows them to bring old devices to the network.

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Verizon is selling seven devices that sport LTE radios in the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band – including the popular Samsung Galaxy S 4 and Nokia’s latest Windows phone, the Lumia 928. When the new network goes live, Verizon will ship out a software update that will activate its dormant AWS radios, Verizon spokesman Tom Pica said.

The other AWS-capable devices are Samsung’s two 10-inch Android tablets, two Verizon Jetpack mobile hotspots and a USB dongle. The current LTE iPhone 5 iteration used by Verizon doesn’t support the AWS band, but that could change with future versions. Meanwhile, the forthcoming BlackBerry Q10 will be able to access the new network, Pica said.

Customers won’t necessarily get faster speeds (though they might experience some initial bandwidth gains over these less-crowded AWS airwaves), but they will have access to a lot more network capacity. Verizon will be adding anywhere from 20 MHz to 40 MHz of new spectrum to its LTE systems – either doubling or tripling its current 4G capacity.

What’s more, Verizon will be focusing the new LTE systems in congested urban centers. It will overlay capacity at cell sites where demand is highest and in some cases surgically inserting bandwidth into highly trafficked indoor and outdoor areas using small cells. Bottom line: customers with newer AWS-capable devices will have access to a hell of a lot more network and enjoy a better mobile data experience in the exact places that experience tends to suffer.

Eventually Verizon will be able to use new LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation techniques to combine its two 4G networks into a single superfast system, but we’re still a year or two away – and another generation of handsets – from seeing that capability.

Going forward, Pica said, Verizon will require its device makers to include AWS support for most new LTE devices. So even if your current smartphone won’t work on the forthcoming network, your next Verizon smartphone most likely will.

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This is no mere transfer of network title, though. Sprint plans to shut down U.S. Cellular’s network completely some time in those two metropolitan regions in the next several months (Champagne, Ill., and South Bend, Ind., will also be affected). And despite the fact that U.S. Cellular’s systems uses the same CDMA technology in the same PCS frequencies, Sprint isn’t supporting its existing handsets. All of those customers must either start over with new devices and new service plans on the Sprint network or go find a new mobile operator entirely.

Sprint Regional VP for the Midwest Kevin Gleason told GigaOM that Sprint planned to make the transition as easy as possible for U.S. Cellular’s customers by offering them plenty of incentive to move to Sprint.

“I believe our recapture rate will be high,” Gleason said. “We’ve already started communicating with them and several of them have already made the switch.”

Sprint has sent out an initial batch of letters notifying them about the transaction but Gleason said Sprint will soon follow up, detailing the timing of the network shutdown and the discount offers Sprint is making to draw those customers under the Sprint umbrella.

While Gleason wouldn’t give any specific details on the exact amount of the discounts, he said they would take many forms: device discounts over Sprint’s usual subsidies, trade-in fees for older phones, porting credits for making the switch and activation fee waivers.

Many customers will be able to get new phones and comparable service plans without having to pay a dime, he said. Many will also be able to upgrade to fancier devices such as the iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S 4 for a much lower than price than other customers would pay, Gleason said. He added that switching customers would also have a great deal of flexibility in plan choices, since Sprint is extending the discount offers to its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile prepaid brands as well.

In general, Sprint and U.S. Cellular’s contract plans are comparable, and in the case of its unlimited data plans, Sprint is actually cheaper. But depending on the circumstances, not every customer will be getting an equitable deal.

For instance if you happen to have just bought a new high-end smartphone or tablet, Sprint incentive discounts won’t cover the full cost of replacing it. What’s worse is that brand new smartphone essentially become useless in a few months when the Chicago and St. Louis networks go dead (though it would work on U.S. Cellular’s other networks). Some customers may also balk at the idea of signing new two-year contracts if they want to take full advantage of the discount offers.

Gleason acknowledged that some customers will feel like they’re getting a raw deal, but he expects those cases will be kept to minimum. He pointed out that 60 percent of U.S. Cellular customers in affected cities have let their contracts lapse and the large majority of them use feature phones. Those subscribers are ripe for an upgrade, he said.

That’s one of the main reasons why U.S. Cellular opted for a wholesale replacement of U.S. Cellular’s networks and devices, rather than a gradual phase out like Sprint is doing with its Nextel iDEN network, Gleason said. So many of those U.S. Cellular devices are old or obsolete that it decided to start fresh with phones optimized for Sprint’s new Network Vision architecture, which boasts the most up-to-date CDMA and LTE technologies.

We’ll know more details about the sunset timeline and the specific discounts in the next couple of weeks. And if you’re a Chicagoan, you’re probably wondering what will happen to the name of U.S. Cellular Field, the home of the White Sox, now that the carrier is leaving the city. Well, it won’t become Sprint Field. Gleason said U.S. Cellular is keeping the naming the rights.

U.S. Cellular Field hoto courtesy of Shutterstock user Alan Mars

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The FCC on Thursday proposed to auction off more airwaves for commercial ground-to-plane broadband communications. We’re not just talking about a handful of frequencies here: The FCC is eyeballing a 500 MHz block of spectrum, which could boost the connection speeds available to aircraft by a factor of 100,000.

As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham explained in a recent post, current in-flight broadband is so pricey and low-bandwidth because airlines rely on expensive satellite or ground-to-air transmissions systems to link aircraft to the internet. The dominant airline provider GoGo uses what is in essence a 3G CDMA network pointed at the sky. That means a single 3Mbps EV-DO connection must be spread among all of the internet users in an aircraft. Your fancy new laptop may support gigabit Wi-Fi, but the bottleneck in the ground-based backhaul link can slow you down to dial-up speeds.

The FCC’s plans, however, key in on a proposal Qualcomm made last year to clear a massive swathe of spectrum in the 14 GHz frequencies over which a kind of super-LTE network could be built. That network would only sport about 150 towers but each of those nodes would blast a high-powered signal into the northern horizon. Airplanes would fly between these huge crescent-shaped cells just as our cellphones move from tower to tower on the ground. But each of these aerial cells would have a whopping 300 Gbps of capacity, which would be shared among all of the planes occupying the surrounding airspace.

That’s a lot of bandwidth, but it’s conceivable that the airlines and their passengers could find a use for it. Today’s in-flight Wi-Fi is priced for the business traveler with an expense account and the inability to go four hours without email access. But these days everyone in the cabin from first-class to steerage is carrying multiple Wi-Fi-enabled devices. And they don’t just want to check email — they they want to stream video and play networked games. Airlines could also use that bandwidth to offer on-demand entertainment and live programming from the cloud, not just from their on-board hard-drives.

As for costs, a more efficient network could allow airlines to drop rates — or maybe even eliminate in-flight broadband fees entirely — to make high-bandwidth connections available to all customers. GoGo’s current network uses 160 towers, making it the same the size as Qualcomm’s proposed system. The infrastructure investment would be about the same, but by using the latest 4G network technologies and hell of a lot more spectrum, we could shove a lot more bandwidth into that infrastructure.

The 14 GHz band is currently used by fixed satellite providers as an uplink path to their birds in orbit. The FCC proposal would require that the any new in-flight network share those frequencies with its current tenants. In its notice of proposed rulemaking, the Commission said it is seeking industry comment to ensure there will be no interference between those two uses.

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On Monday, the Sprint’s board announced that it has formed a special committee of independent directors to “carefully evaluate” Dish’s $25.5 billion offer to buy up the company. But it also wants to keep its original $20.1 billion deal with SoftBank deal on track — despite Dish’s attempts to put it on hold.

On Friday it asked the Federal Communications Commission to keep its official review of Sprint-Softbank going, keeping the deal on target for final approval this year. The FCC is already 140 days into its initial 180-day review, but the U.S. Department of Justice has asked the FCC to delay proceedings while its National Security division looks into foreign ownership issues.

When Dish countered SoftBank’s offer last week it asked for a suspension of the regulatory review, but Sprint said there is no reason to stop clock even as Sprint negotiates with Dish. In fact, in its FCC filing Sprint accused Dish of political maneuvering to muck up the SoftBank deal. From the letter:

“DISH wrongly suggests that it would be prudent for the Commission to derail this review while it waits until an alleged uncertainty – uncertainty that DISH itself is attempting to create by its unsolicited proposal – is resolved. DISH has this exactly backwards. The Commission has been working diligently on the pending applications, which now stand at day 140 of the Commission’s shot clock. The Commission must not be distracted by DISH’s latest maneuverings, just as it was not distracted by DISH’s original request, and, based on long-established precedent, continue the orderly processing of the applications to conclusion.”

Meanwhile, the special five-director committee will weigh whether the Dish’s bid represents, or will likely lead to, a “Superior Offer” to Softbank’s. Dish may be offering more money, but as TMF Associates analyst Tim Farrar points out, Sprint has to look at other factors besides value to determine if a Dish-Sprint tie-up is worth the trouble.

Dish may offer Sprint some strategic advantages — combining both companies’ spectrum with Sprint’s mobile network and Dish’s satellite TV service — but if SoftBank matches Dish’s offer, Sprint may figure it can buy whatever strategic advantages it needs with SoftBank’s cash.

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Softbank offers much-needed investment to the still struggling No. 3 U.S. wireless operator. But Dish doesn’t just bring cash; it’s got 4G spectrum and a huge pay TV network to boot. Informa Telecoms & Media Principal Analyst Mike Roberts lays out all of the advantages of a Sprint-Dish marriage:

“First and most importantly, Dish could combine its 2GHz LTE spectrum with the LTE spectrum of Sprint and Clearwire to build one of the strongest LTE spectrum portfolios in US, which would be the foundation for a powerful new competitor in the US telecoms market. Second, using Sprint’s newly-modernized mobile network would give Dish a cost-effective way to deploy LTE in its 2GHz spectrum and meet the FCC’s rollout requirements. Third, if the deal goes ahead, Dish and Sprint could quickly offer TV, broadband and mobile bundles to compete more effectively with larger integrated telecoms players such as Verizon and AT&T.”

In particular, Dish’s spectrum would give Sprint the immediate room it needs to grow its LTE capacity. Sprint’s current LTE network is bit undersized compared to high-capacity 4G networks its competitors are rolling out. While Sprint is planning to buy the remaining stake in Clearwire — which would give it Clearwire’s vast 2.5 GHz holdings — Clearwire is using a different type of LTE technology that could make getting the right consumer devices more difficult. Becoming part of Dish would give it the right kind of licenses to complement Sprint’s current network.

Also, Sprint taking over Clearwire isn’t a given. Several other companies have expressed interest in the 4G operator and its spectrum, and last week Clearwire revealed it just got a new offer from an unnamed entity to acquire its licenses in big cities for between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. The Wall Street Journal pegged that unnamed company as Verizon Wireless.

Given all of the crazy variables in this complex game of spectrum chess, it seems like a Sprint and Dish would form a good match, but the companies haven’t always seen eye-to-eye.

There was once talk of a partnership between the two, using Sprint’s new networks to host Dish’s LTE service. But those talks fizzled, and Sprint and Dish wound up becoming big adversaries, fighting over Clearwire’s future and squabbling about interference issues in their spectrum neighborhood.

Copious amounts of money certainly can heal old wounds, but there’s a question of whether Dish has enough money. Despite Dish’s big war chest, it would still need to go $9 billion further into debt to finance its proposed deal, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Christopher King said in a research note. Dish may have just set off a bidding war, but it might not have the money to see it through. According to King:

“We believe that DISH is more strategically desperate for Sprint than is SoftBank; however, SoftBank certainly has deeper pockets. … As such, we believe SoftBank is in a better position, financially speaking, to match DISH’s offer – or raise the offer further – should it choose to do so. It appears to us that Sprint is in a solid position from a negotiating standpoint.”

If the money’s right, Sprint may not care about any of the strategic advantages of a Dish deal. As with all carriers, Sprint’s foremost concern is spectrum and Sprint may be in a position to acquire better licenses with Softbank’s cash.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice advised the Federal Communications Commission to set rules for its forthcoming TV airwaves auction favoring smaller operators like Sprint and T-Mobile over dominant carriers AT&T and Verizon. If FCC does give Sprint an advantage in that auction, it could walk away with some very attractive 600 MHz airwaves without breaking the bank.

Chess photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Elnur

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The news was first broken by The Guardian (see disclosure) on the weekend, and was subsequently confirmed to me by the National Audit Office (NAO) itself on Monday morning. The upcoming investigation was triggered by member of parliament Helen Goodman, who complained that the government “failed to get value for money” in the auction.

“It’s a little early to say exactly what we’re going to be looking at,” a spokesman for the NAO told me. “We will soon be in a position to put a remit of the study and a timescale on our website.”

This should be an interesting one. The telecoms regulator Ofcom, which has hailed the result as a success, has always been crystal clear on the fact that its auction was not designed to raise the maximum revenue possible (everyone has learned their lessons from the £22.5 billion 3G auction a dozen years ago, which nearly crippled the industry), but rather to keep the market competitive and make sure as many people as possible get coverage.

As for the source of the £3.5 billion figure floated by the government, there seems to be a disturbing amount of buck-passing going on. As I wrote on the auction’s completion in February:

“The reserve price for the auction was £1.3 billion, although the government had budgeted for it to bring in £3.5 billion. Does that make the result disappointing? That depends on whether you see the government forecast as politically motivated or focused on the actual worth of the spectrum. There was never much justification given for the £3.5 billion figure, and no-one appears to be taking responsibility for it — today the Treasury told me to take my questions about the figure’s rationale to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the DCMS told me to ask the Treasury.”

Now, according to The Guardian, the Treasury is claiming the figure came out of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Whoever came up with it, I’ve not seen a scrap of the rationale behind it.

It is worth noting that the £3.5 billion figure was floated last year at a time when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, was trying to maintain that the national deficit would fall, not rise, in 2013. Without the predicted boost from the spectrum auction, the margin would have been much smaller. And, as it turned out in last month’s Budget statement, the deficit for 2013 is indeed up on that for 2012, not down.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media, which publishes The Guardian, is a minority investor in GigaOM.

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