Verizon Communications, parent company of the largest mobile operator in the US, Verizon Wireless, voiced objections to a plan to limit how much spectrum it can buy in an auction due to take place in 2015.

According to a Reuters report, the company said in a meeting with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officials that limiting the spectrum it could acquire would subsidise smaller national carriers and their foreign owners.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler recently proposed rules for the auction of spectrum in the 600MHz band due to take place in the middle of 2015. These include reserving up to 30MHz of airwaves in each market for carriers that do not already have a third of low-band spectrum.

Verizon Wireless and US number-two operator AT&T dominate in low-band spectrum holdings, so limiting the spectrum they can acquire will benefit Sprint and T-Mobile US, who are majority owned by Japan’s SoftBank and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom respectively.

In the filing yesterday, Verizon said it would be “perverse and unjust” for the FCC to adopt auction rules that “subsidise some large multinational companies at the expense of their competitors”.

AT&T indicated earlier this month that it may choose not to take part in the auction if the rules to reserve spectrum are adopted.

The auction process will see TV stations give up airwaves they use to be auctioned to operators. US Congress has mandated that the FCC should raise enough funds to compensate the broadcasters for the spectrum they give up and to fund a new public safety network, expected to cost around $7 billion.

The FCC will vote on the proposals on 15 May.

T-Mobile recently expressed reservations about a planned auction of AWS-3 spectrum which covers pairings of frequencies in the 1.7GHz and 2.1GHz bands.

The US number-four player called for small blocks of AWS-3 spectrum to be made available when it goes under the hammer, but AT&T argues that US telecoms regulator FCC is on the right track by appearing to favour large blocks.