After five rounds of bidding, the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of millimeter wave spectrum for 5G service has raised more than $62.2 million. Two more rounds of bidding are scheduled, after bidding in Auction 101 was temporarily suspended on Thursday (11/15/18) afternoon due to severe weather in the Washington, D.C. area.

Auction 101 includes just over 3,000 county-based licenses in two 425-megahertz blocks of spectrum at 27.5 – 27.925 GHz and 27.925 – 28.350 GHz. Bidding began on Wednesday with forty qualified bidders.

More than 2,100 of the licenses have received bids, with the FCC still holding 951 licenses.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement that this spectrum “will be critical in deploying 5G services and applications.

“Between the auctions this year and next, the FCC will push almost 5 gigahertz of spectrum into the commercial marketplace over the course of the next 15 months,” Pai went on. “To put that in perspective, that is more spectrum than is currently used for terrestrial mobile broadband by all wireless service providers combined. We will continue to pursue an aggressive spectrum strategy, a key component—along with wireless infrastructure deployment and regulatory modernization—of the FCC’s plan to Facilitate America’s Superiority in 5G Technology.”