FCC commissioner says spectrum auction could be ‘win-win’

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Nathan Simington said the Pentagon’s decades-old grip on valuable radio spectrum may need to loosen in order to allow wireless networks to build more 5G and 6G infrastructure, in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The commissioner outlined how military spectrum holdings — some dating back to the Truman administration — could be commercialized through a “win-win” auction model that he said has successfully relocated federal agencies before. Simington said President Donald Trump’s push to commercialize 600 megahertz of spectrum in his “big, beautiful bill” represents a major policy shift toward prioritizing America’s wireless infrastructure.

“A lot of bands have been held since the Truman administration,” Simington told the DCNF. “That comes from an era when the only ways to separate different applications was to have them on slightly different frequencies or in different geographic areas. Now, increasingly, we can virtually separate them within software.”

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The debate centers on the coveted mid-band 3.1 to 3.45 spectrum — prime real estate for cellular providers that the Pentagon has argued is essential for national security. Simington said modern technology allows multiple services to share spectrum through software separation, potentially making the debate obsolete.

“What happens if we collapse several of these services into one band and then separate them in software, allowing for greater bandwidth and larger channel size?” the commissioner asked. He said the FCC hopes to advance a “spectral efficiency” proceeding during Trump’s term that would explore these possibilities.

The commissioner pointed to the successful 2006 AWS-1 auction as a template, where auction revenues paid for 60 federal agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service, to relocate their operations from valuable spectrum that was then sold to commercial wireless companies.

“They bought it in good faith. They deployed it in good faith,” Simington said of federal agencies using spectrum. “If we make a decision that spectrum would have a higher and better commercial use, then supposedly there would be far more than enough in the auction proceeds to buy them out.”

Simington emphasized that the spectrum commercialization decision ultimately rests with Trump, noting that under a February executive order, “agency independence is clearly not what it used to be.” He said his role is to implement whatever the president and Congress decide.

“The question before the president is whatever happens to be the equipment that the DOD is relocating and the functions that the DOD is being asked to relocate — is the juice worth the squeeze?” Simington told the DCNF.

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