Is this good or bad ? and for what purpose ?
Well, it's good if they repeal the law that required the give-back. But that hasn't happened yet.
The law says that by 2021 they have to start bidding on the 470-520MHz spectrum.
That part is bad. FCC is just saying that the "law of the land" says they have to start getting ready to bid the spectrum, so they are going to stop allowing changes/licenses, etc.
There's a lot of public safety users in that spectrum that would need to move to other bands and replace all their equipment. At no point was any spectrum identified for that move, only that they had to move. The general idea was that these agencies needed to move to 700MHz.
But that creates issues since the propagation differences between 470-520 and 700MHz is different. That would mean more radio sites in most cases.
And if we compare that to the Nextel 800MHz rebanding, we can see that it'll take a L-O-N-G time to happen and will have lots of hidden issues along the way.
So, hopefully sanity will prevail in Washington (yeah, right….) and this nonsense will get shut down.
The general idea was that auctioning off that spectrum would raise a few billion dollars for the federal government (FCC = Federal Cash Cow).
So, screw public safety, give the spectrum to cellular/WISP, etc. and take the money to pay for government stuff. Theoretically the moving of agencies to other spectrum would be covered, but 800MHz/Nextel showed us that was a Charlie Foxtrot.