Lumen Technologies is looking to sell its CBRS spectrum to Citizens Band License Company (CBLC).
In a filing to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), as first reported by Light Reading, Lumen has sought permission from the FCC to sell 3.5GHz spectrum.
Actel, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lumen, originally won the licenses for Centurylink, which rebranded its enterprise business as Lumen Technologies in 2020.
The company spent $9.1 million on the 265 CBRS spectrum licenses during the FCC's 2020 auction, according to Airwave Research.
The filing states that the spectrum licenses would allow CBLC to offer mobile wireless broadband services to consumers in rural areas.
CBLC is majority-owned and controlled by Jonathan D. Foxman and Daniel E. Hopkins, both of whom have ties Cellular One, a regional wireless services provider. During the same spectrum auction five years ago, Cellular One only spent $200,000.
Financial terms were not disclosed in the filing.
"The transaction involves only the assignment of spectrum and does not include the transfer of any other assets, facilities, or customers. Also, there will be no loss of an existing service provider in any area, and there will be no discontinuance, reduction, loss, or impairment of service to end-user customers," noted Lumen in the filing.
It was reported in December that Lumen is considering a sale of its consumer fiber business unit, estimated to be worth between $6-9 billion.
Lumen's CFO Chris Stansbury has previously said the company would consider opportunities to offload some of its wireless network business assets across its "mass markets."
The company's mass market division served 2.6 million residential and small business customers at the end of the third quarter of 2024, of which close to one million of them were on fiber connections, while the rest were on the operator's copper network.
Lumen has instead outlined its AI push, notably signing separate AI cloud deals with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in November. In August, Lumen said it had secured $5bn in new business, which it said was primarily due to AI sales.
