We keep on hearing about this looming spectrum crisis and if you ask the carriers, the answer if for the government to make more spectrum available. But what if the real solution is to reduce the amount of carriers?
A study from The Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies (got all that?) finds that reducing the number of mobile carriers would help ease the strain on wireless spectrum. The outcome specifically concludes that when there’s less competition among carriers, prices drop and thereby allow for more money to be invested in fixing the spectrum crisis. This would also allow each carrier to gain access to a bigger amount of spectrum.
“No one has formally studied how spectrum shortages affect competition in wireless communications. Our study is the first, and its findings are significant,” said Phoenix Center President Lawrence Spiwak. “If mobile carriers have too little spectrum, then the standard view that more competitors leads to lower prices is precisely backwards. Clearly, policymakers need to re-orientate their thinking about competition in the wireless industry.”
More than any other carrier, AT&T has suffered tremendously over the past few years. After Apple released the first iPhone in 2007 exclusively on its network, data usage exploded. As a result, the speed and stability of AT&T’s network went downhill. The carrier has been aggressively working toward improvement, but as more data-hungry smartphone users pour in every day, AT&T — and for that matter, many other carriers — probably feel like they are biting off more than they can chew.
So, what do you think about this and the potential impact it could have on mobile competition?