that is the stupidest statement you have made yet...
How many "spectrum" holders would you assume? And how much do they need to pay?
Today the dominat ones are like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. But as you have seen in less than 3 years, Apple has come out of nowhere to be a dominant player in all this. They did it purely by using otehr poeples spectrum. If you mean that your going to build out a $10B+ infrastructure and network just so you can refuse to play nice, then your wrong. Go check the market cap on Nextwave.
Best policy is to have enough capacity to support all this and still afford to build out. When you have on one side a shareholder who demands a profit of XX $Bs on a wireless carrier and customers who have to pay a big number to access versus a carrier who makes 30% after all costs and taxes and still stays solvent, shareholders who don;t scream that they must get paid first or have some increase of exponential returns. If we have hte latter, then perhaps we can get the economies of scale and cooperations needed.
Unfortunatley, the spectrum sales the way we do it leads to hoarding and corporate greed factors. Profits are done to lead profits among your peers. We are not rated on serviceabliuty or coolness of hte network, we are rated on pure greed factors by the street.
All the carriers need to trim about 50% of their work force, but they do not because they have such high profits. Sprint could cut 80% and rehire people who are hungary and save $B'ns.
Here is a thought. 50 years ago, wireline was King and wireless did not exist. Everyone was working on how to make wireline more competitive, so they broke up the monolploy and made 7 operating companies. but today, more and more are turning to cellphone only and no wireline, so wireline is dying and going BK (look at Hawaiian Tel). But back then perhaps you would be one of those that were touting that we would have video wireline phones (1980), or that we could wire the nation with copper(1950).
I agree that in the future, there are going to be an exponential rise in teh number of wireless things. I just do not see it being possible to do it wiht more specturm, but rather with more infrastructure and more backhaul. The wirelines of yesterday will become the backhauls of today. And if they become the backhauls, they will have re-invented themselves. In order to reach the saturation that we need in 2020, we will need the backhaul providers to come down an order of magnitude in pricing and the density of hte cell towers to ahve gone up 100 fold. At that point, we can get to 50-100 Mbps everywhere like Jobs would like.
If they really want to get to this nirvana, then invest all that money in tiny BTS and not in spectrum. |
