T-Mobile Selling Valuable Spectrum to Grain Management

WASHINGTON, March 21, 2025 – T-Mobile is selling its 800 MegaHertz spectrum licenses to investment firm Grain Management in exchange for cash and the investment firm’s 600 MHz holdings, the companies announced Thursday.

The companies didn’t say how much Grain would be paying in addition to the licenses. They had already entered into a lease agreement giving T-Mobile access to Grain’s 600 MHz spectrum, which the carrier said it had already mostly deployed.

Grain is looking to market the 800 MHz airwaves to utility companies for private networks. The deal, which will need Federal Communications Commission approval, is expected to be “finalized” by May 2025 and close sometime after that.

“We are very pleased with the terms we reached with Grain and think the deal represents a great value for both parties,” Dirk Mosa, T-Mobile’s senior vice president of spectrum, partnerships and acquisitions, said in a statement.

The carrier was supposed to sell the spectrum to Dish as part of its merger with Sprint, but Dish couldn’t come up with the required $3.59 billion. T-Mobile then moved to auction its 800 MHz licenses last year, also a requirement of the deal, but again nobody bid up to the target price and the company was able to keep the airwaves.

The company has used 600 MHz airwaves for its 5G network, spending billions on licenses in the band in recent years. Based on those transactions, New Street Research analyst Philip Burnett estimated Grain’s 600 MHz licenses were worth about $700 million.

“We doubt that T-Mobile would be willing to accept a $2.9 billion loss in this transaction,” he wrote in an investor note. “We would assume the cash T-Mobile receives is ultimately put toward share repurchases.”

Grain, headed by communications industry veteran David Grain, also owns multiple regional fiber providers, a subsea cable operator, and a portfolio of towers, among other things.

The companies had submitted a filing with the FCC asking for approval on the deal last week. They asked for waivers to extend the build out timeline associated with the licenses until 12 years after the deal and to ensure a utility company building a new network would be able to renew the licenses in 2028, when the vast majority are up for renewal.

“Grain intends to work with – indeed, has already begun working with – utilities and other wireless operators to deploy the 800 MHz Licenses as quickly as possible to address a rapidly growing need for spectrum capacity among utilities and other critical infrastructure providers,” the companies wrote. “Grant of the 800 MHz Applications would thus foster the development of the long-term spectrum pipeline for critical infrastructure that utilities have been seeking.”