Sometime after Oct. 30, you can expect a buyer and seller to get together on what could become the eBay of wireless spectrum.

That’s the launch date set for SpecEx.com, which is billed as the first fully online, fully automated exchange for buying, selling and leasing spectrum licensed by the FCC.  

The site is run by a start-up called Spectrum Bridge. The name is suggestive: The newcomer aims to bridge the long-standing gap between buyers and sellers in the secondary spectrum market, where the FCC has granted to some licensees the right to unbundle the spectrum they’ve been awarded and resell it, lease or even timeshare it. The company says it has received or been promised spectrum listings with a total current value of $250 million.

That could be just the beginning, because according to a number of studies and experts, the majority of licensed spectrum in the United States is unused or under-used at any given time. The FCC in recent years changed its rules to encourage a secondary market in spectrum, and much easier leasing of larger amounts of spectrum. It’s part of a shift in thinking by regulators, academics and business leaders. Having a more efficient mechanism for marketing spectrum could put this valuable resource to work in new wireless services, either by carriers and providers or directly by enterprises seeking private networking capabilities.

Until now, this market has relied on middlemen who cultivate industry contacts to find out what spectrum might meet a buyer’s requirements, and what spectrum holders might be interested in selling — provided the two sides can figure out what the spectrum is worth.

The eBay of spectrum?

Enter SpecEx, the eBay for wireless, or the wireless equivalent of the real estate industry’s Multiple Listing Service.

Spectrum Bridge was founded in March 2007 by an executive team that had launched Mesh Networks (later bought by Motorola). They rounded up $2 million from investors including True Ventures; the Telecom Development Fund, which is funded by the FCC with interest collected from holding deposits for federal spectrum auctions; and Milcom Venture Partners.

Rick Rotondo, chief marketing officer and a co-founder of Spectrum Bridge, says the start-up estimates that well over 5GHz of spectrum is eligible for the secondary market, a huge amount. “Most cellular carriers out there today have about 150MHz or less to run their entire business,” he says.