PBS TV stations in smaller communities and secondary PBS affiliates and public stations in large ones are ending their free, over-the-air television broadcasts after decades of service because of politics, budget cuts and repacking the TV dial to give up more spectrum for wireless providers.

The most significant trigger for the impending closedown of several stations, especially those run from universities, is the FCC’s spectrum auction and reallocation plan, repacking UHF stations into a much smaller number of available channels, requiring stations to buy new transmitting equipment many cannot afford.

The original plan to repack television stations reassured affected broadcasters that the auction proceeds from the wireless industry auctions would cover the costs of the necessary new equipment.

KNCT’s coverage partly overlaps other nearby public stations.

Then Central Texas College, which owns and operates PBS affiliate KNCT in Belton, Tex., learned Republicans in Congress might appropriate only enough funding to cover 60% of the transition costs. The trustees that oversee KNCT, which serves central Texas, realized they would have to find roughly half of the $4.5 million needed to change their channel from 46 to 17 as part of the “station repack” and hope Congress would change its mind and reimburse the station.

That was money the trustees ultimately decided could not be found, especially as annual deficits at the station now average $500,000 — costs covered by the college.

KNCT general manager Max Rudolph, who has been in charge of KNCT for most of its 38 year history, said the station will now have to leave the airwaves.

“The board had to make a tough decision, but repacking was only the tip of the iceberg,” Rudolph said. “It’s economics — dollars and cents.”

KNCT operates with a staff of 15 — including five part-time employees, that take care of both the PBS TV station and KNCT-FM, which will continue on the air. The annual budget for the TV station was about $1 million, half spent on PBS membership and programming. Donors also provided around $160,000 a year.

KNCT-TV serves the Belton/Killeen/Temple/Waco, Tex. market, although KNCT’s signal struggles to reach into the northeastern part of its service area near Waco, where public TV station KAMU-TV in more distant College Station strangely provides a better signal.

The station hopes to continue operations through online streaming and on-demand shows kept on its website, but both require a subscription to internet service. For parts of central Texas, it represents the end of free PBS over-the-air programming.

Last year, Central Michigan University decided to accept a $14 million offer for satellite PBS station WCMZ-TV in Flint to vacate its current UHF channel and close down for good April 23, 2018. WCMZ-TV’s signal reaches as far away as Port Huron, Detroit and Lansing. But its intended market was Flint, which lacked local PBS service when the station signed on more than 30 years ago. Today, Central Michigan University still operates its primary station WCMU in Mount Pleasant, along with WCMV, which serves Cadillac and Traverse City, WCML, serving Alpena, Petoskey, Cheboygan and the Straits of Mackinac, and WCMW, which broadcasts to the Lake Michigan communities of Manistee, Ludington and Pentwater.

CMU officials are pulling the plug on WCMZ because, they claim, 99 percent of viewers live in areas that are now served by other public broadcasting stations. While cord cutters may miss WCMZ, cable and other pay television customers likely won’t because the service is expected to continue uninterrupted on cable and possibly satellite.

KMTP, San Francisco’s youngest multicultural public television station, is looking for a new home after selling its spectrum for $87.8 million in last year’s FCC auction. KMTP is licensed to Minority Television Project, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation, and serves the San Francisco Bay Area with non-commercial public television. KMTP broadcasts international programming in multiple languages including English and is not affiliated with PBS.

Its best chance to survive is dependent on an acquisition or arrangement with Poquito Mas Communications LLC, the licensee of low-power KCNZ in San Francisco, which is best known for carrying Creation TV, a Chinese language religious network. KMTP can either occupy several of KCNZ’s subchannels, or potentially buy the station outright. As a low power outlet, KMTP can hope to keep carriage on cable television, giving it perfect reception in areas where KCNZ’s low-power UHF transmitter cannot reach. But that means cord-cutters may have no access to the channel unless they live near the transmitter.

WUSF-TV, on the air in Tampa for 51 years, signed off late last year after the University of South Florida decided to liquidate the station for $18.8 million in auction proceeds from the FCC’s spectrum auction. The area’s larger PBS station, WEDU, has absorbed most of the programming that used to appear on WUSF, which now appears as a virtual subchannel on WEDU — unofficially called WEDQ.

Today, WEDU carries six different signals on its over the air digital channel: WEDU/PBS HD, PBS World, PBS Kids, WEDU+, Florida Channel, and Create TV. Many of these services are also available on cable television. But the original competing voice from WUSF is now gone.

WYCC in Chicago was the city’s second PBS affiliate, behind the larger and better known WTTW. Licensed by City Colleges of Chicago, the trustees decided to liquidate WYCC last year for cash as part of the FCC’s spectrum auction.

WYCC began its operations in 1983 with a message from President Ronald Reagan, congratulating the station for producing adult learning programming lacking on commercial television. WYCC first ended its PBS affiliation in 2017 and had one sole program provider, MHz Networks’ WorldView, when it ceased broadcasting on Nov. 27, 2017.

WTTW has sought to claim WYCC’s remaining assets and intends to place WorldView on one of its subchannels in the future. It already grabbed two Australian shows WYCC used to air:  “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” and “The Doctor Blake Mysteries.” All that will remain of WYCC are its “call letters,” which could possibly reappear when WTTW launches WorldView.

A Verizon executive told investors there is no wireless spectrum shortage in the United States and Verizon has historically purchased and warehoused spectrum it had no intention of using immediately.

Fran Shammo, chief financial officer of Verizon Communications, drew attention to Verizon’s controversial spectrum acquisition policy as part of a conversation with investors about the recent FCC auction that sold 65 megahertz of wireless frequencies for an unprecedented $44.9 billion, far and away the highest ever seen in a spectrum auction.

“In every purchase of spectrum up to this auction, the scale was that it was more efficient to buy spectrum than it was to build capacity because the scale was spectrum was cheaper to build on capacity,” Shammo said.

Before the auction, there were significant differences in Verizon Wireless’ network capacity in different cities. In New York City, Verizon controls 127MHz. In Los Angeles and San Francisco it manages with 107MHz, but only has 97MHz to work with in Philadelphia, San Diego and Chicago.

Verizon Wireless has always held spectrum it acquired at auction but never put into widespread use on its network. But bidding during the FCC’s most recent Auction 97 made bidding and warehousing unused frequencies an expensive proposition, more expensive than beefing up Verizon’s existing network with additional cell towers, microcells, and other technology to make the most use of existing spectrum assets.

“This auction flipped [our acquisition] equation in certain markets,” Shammo said in reference to Verizon’s bidding strategy. “And so we became much more diligent on what markets we strategically wanted and [which] we were willing to let go because when you looked at it, if I was to get what I wanted initially when I went in, I would have spent an extra $6 billion when I could create the same capacity with $1.5 billion by building it.”

In the most recent auction, Verizon Wireless considered spectrum acquisitions crucial in California, where it added frequencies in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco. But Verizon gave up bidding on spectrum for densely populated New York and Boston where the asking price grew too high. That forces Verizon Wireless to increase the efficiency of its existing network in those cities. It will do so by deploying more cell towers to divide the traffic load, as well as adding microcells and other small-area solutions in high traffic urban areas.

Despite not getting everything it wanted, Verizon took the auction results in stride, claiming its network was fully capable of handling growing traffic loads even in areas where it failed to win new spectrum.

“People think that spectrum is the Holy Grail and if you don’t have enough spectrum, you can’t have the capacity,” Shammo said. “But actually that’s not true now because technology has changed so much. If you look at small cell technology, diversified antenna systems, and when you think [about] Chicago, if you walk down the street, you see small cells on lamp posts. So, the municipalities are starting to open up to that small cell technology.”

AT&T paid $18.2 billion for nearly 250 licenses, compared with $10.4 billion Verizon will spend on 181 licenses. The presence of Dish Networks in the bidding clearly irritated AT&T and Verizon, primarily because the satellite dish provider incorporated two “designated entities” — SNR Wireless LicenseCo and Northstar Wireless — as bidding partners, winning up to 25% off their bids as part of a “small business discount.” The two DEs won over $13 billion in licenses with $3 billion in savings.

AT&T accused Dish of circumventing auction activity rules and distorting the bidding.

“As a result, Dish the corporate entity won no licenses,” said Joan Marsh, AT&T’s vice president of federal regulatory matters. “The Dish DEs, who each enjoyed a 25% discount, won substantial allocations.”

Marsh complained Dish already controls around 81MHz of spectrum that remains unused for wireless telecom services.

Dish also made life difficult for large carriers who have learned to predict the likely bidding strategies of their competitors based on experience. Many were surprised Dish managed to both bid up prices and win a substantial percentage of spectrum, all for a wireless business it has yet to build.

T-Mobile was not happy either. CEO John Legere called the auction “a disaster for American wireless consumers.” T-Mobile suffered considerably in the auction, outspent by Dish & Friends 132 times for important wireless licenses.

“Three companies alone spent an insane $42 billion between them, grabbing a ridiculous 94 percent of the spectrum sold at this auction,” Legere wrote, referring to AT&T, Dish Network and Verizon Wireless. “This whole thing should scare the hell out of you and every other wireless consumer in the U.S., because there is another important auction next year, and the results have to be different if wireless competition is going to survive.”

With the auction over, Verizon Wireless will continue to shift its spectrum usage around to accommodate network changes. Verizon will continue to emphasize enlarging 4G LTE services while gradually reducing the percentage of its network used for other purposes. Verizon expects to shut off its CDMA voice network in the early 2020s and is reducing the amount of spectrum dedicated to supporting its legacy 3G network.

Phillip “Every other 2008 spectrum bidder except U.S. Cellular has since sold its winnings to AT&T or Verizon Wireless or has never provided competitive service” Dampier

AT&T is unhappy with a proposal from a wireless competitor it originally tried to buy in 2011 that would offer smaller competitors a more realistic chance of winning favored 600MHz spectrum vacated by UHF television stations at a forthcoming FCC auction.

T-Mobile’s “Dynamic Market Rule” proposal would establish a cap on the amount of spectrum market leaders AT&T and Verizon Wireless, flush with financial resources for the auction, could win.

“Imposing modest constraints on excessive low-band spectrum aggregation will promote competition, increase consumer choice, encourage innovation, and accelerate broadband deployment,” T-Mobile offered in its proposal to the FCC.

Without some limits, wireless competitors Sprint and T-Mobile, among other smaller carriers, could find themselves outbid for the prime spectrum, well-suited for penetrating buildings and requiring a smaller network of cell towers to deliver blanket coverage.

In a public policy blog post today, AT&T argues T-Mobile is behind the times and its proposal is unfair and unworkable:

First, the purported advantage of low band spectrum – that it allows more coverage and better building penetration with fewer cell sites – has been overtaken by marketplace realities under which capacity not coverage drives network deployment.  Carriers deploying low band and high band spectrum alike must squeeze as many cell sites as they can into their networks to meet exploding demand for data services.  Second, to the extent this is less the case in rural areas, those areas are not spectrum-constrained and the lower cost of building out low band spectrum in such areas is offset by the higher cost of the spectrum itself.

[…] But this is not the only point that should concern policymakers.  Such caps will also suppress auction revenues, potentially to the point of auction failure, ultimately reducing the amount of spectrum freed up for mobile broadband use and undermining the auction’s ability to meet critical statutory goals.

[…] Even if T-Mobile’s proposal did not result in complete auction failure, its proposed caps would suppress auction revenues, reducing the amount of spectrum freed up for mobile broadband use as well as funds generated for FirstNet and to pay down the national debt.  That is because strict limits on participation by otherwise qualified bidders will make the auction less competitive and will yield less revenue.  Indeed, if T-Mobile’s proposed spectrum cap was strictly enforced, Verizon estimates it would be barred from bidding in 7 of the top 10 markets.  AT&T would face similar bidding limitations, as noted in our filing.

AT&T suggests the last major auction in 2008 attracted 214 qualified bidders and 101 bidders won licenses, including carriers of all sizes and new entrants.

But an analysis by Stop the Cap! shows the breakaway winners of the 2008 auction were none other than AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which paid a combined $16.3 billion of the total $19.592 billion raised. For that money, they acquired:

• Block A – Verizon Wireless and U.S. Cellular both bought 25 licenses each. In this block, Verizon targeted urban areas, while U.S. Cellular bought licenses primarily in the northern part of the U.S., where it provides regional cellular service. Cavalier Telephone and CenturyTel also bought 23 and 21 licenses, respectively. Cavalier Telephone is now wholly owned by Windstream, which does not provide cell service and was selling its 700MHz spectrum to none other than AT&T. So is CenturyLink (formerly CenturyTel).

• Block B – AT&T Mobility was the biggest buyer in the B block, with 227 licenses totaling $6.6 billion. U.S. Cellular and Verizon bought 127 and 77 licenses, respectively. AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless bought licenses around the country, while U.S. Cellular continued with its strategy to buy licenses in its home network northern regions.

• Block C – Of the 10 licenses in the C Block, Verizon Wireless bought the 7 that cover the contiguous 48 states (and Hawaii). Those seven licenses cost Verizon roughly $4.7 billion. Of the other three, Triad Communications — a wireless spectrum speculator — bought the two covering Alaska, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands through its Triad 700, LLC investor partnership, while Small Ventures USA, L.P. bought the one covering the Gulf of Mexico. Triad 700, LLC sold its spectrum last fall to AT&T while Small Ventures USA sold theirs to Verizon Wireless.

• Block E – EchoStar spent $711 million to buy 168 of the 176 available Block E licenses. This block, made up of unpaired spectrum, will likely be used to stream television shows. Qualcomm also bought 5 licenses. Neither company has used its spectrum to offer any services five years after the auction ended.

So much for improving the competitive landscape of wireless. Other than U.S. Cellular, which is rumored to be on AT&T and Verizon Wireless’ acquisitions wish list, every auction winner has either sold its spectrum to the wireless giants or has done nothing with it.

If “highest bidder wins”-rules apply at the forthcoming auction, expect more of the same.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless have significant financial resources to outbid Sprint, T-Mobile and smaller carriers and will likely win the bulk of the available spectrum whether they actually need it or not. Smaller victories may be won by smaller competitors, but only in rural areas and sections of the country disfavored by the largest two.