[gTen]

What AT&T is trying to do is use spectrum as an excuse for the merger, while I can see that this will be a huge benefit for ATT and T-mobile, at the same time its horrible for the consumer market. And at the moment the FCC has no good plan to deal with the spectrum issue.

So the best suggestion is this, FORCE all the carriers to open up their spectrum and create a large spectrum pool..then decide on 1 tech that will be used in that pool such as LTE for example..I don't see any reason why companies need to fight over spectrum in the same locations, we don't need 3 carriers doing GSM, 2 carriers doing IDEN, 2 carriers doing wimax, 4 carriers doing CDMA, 5 carriers doing LTE all in the same city...the spectrum just lies there unused...

Kinda like in NYC where verizon owns all the telephone lines and the others just piggy back on Verizon's lines since it would be hectic if everyone owned their own lines due to lack of space.

Now if all carriers pool their spectrum together it would be a win for carriers and a win for consumers. This also would help a lot in safety situations. I mean when your in a life or death situation, do you want to worry whether or not you picked Verizon, ATT or Sprint because the location you happen to be in has a bad signal?

As things stand the United States will NEVER achieve 100% cellphone coverage and will always have spectrum limitations. If spectrum is shared among all carriers, they won't have to make 20 towers doing the exact same thing..this will cut down overall maintenance costs and allow them to place towers more efficiently to have perfect signal everywhere and eliminate dead spots.

There are things that need to be addressed though, in doing this some motivation has to be given for the carriers to build out in places with little population, though considering the size of 4g towers in comparison to old 3g towers it should not be too much problem if they split costs with local communities. And the biggest problem would be figuring out a way to motivate carriers to look beyond 4g..aka if this plan is implemented there won't be too much motivation for carriers to upgrade their equipment just so that the others can benefit of it. So some sort of policy needs to be set out to motivate them to upgrade their networks.

Otherwise this is a win/win situation and will also allow smaller carriers to compete and enter the markets. Solve most of the carriers spectrum/bandwidth issues and a HUGE win for the consumers.

Of course the carriers would not like this because it weakens their hold on the very noncompetitive market but this must be done if we wish to catch up to other countries technologically, cause so far we are falling behind more and more..