It's not quite as wasteful as it might seem. Even if there was just one national carrier that owned all of T-Mobile/AT&T/Verizon, they'd still need close to th

It's not quite as wasteful as it might seem. Even if there was just one national carrier that owned all of T-Mobile/AT&T/Verizon, they'd still need close to the current amount of RRUs + gear + backhaul, to support the same number of total users on all of the various spectrum bands being used. There would be some maintenance/cost savings. But not a huge night-and-day difference. -- For what it's worth, Portland charges $250/month for a point of presence (from the article). I'm no cellular expert, but from my WISP days, that's the cheapest rate I've ever heard of for a such a thing, short of donations on farms and windmills and the like. Similar rent on a cell tower would cost $1,000 to $3,000+/month. I'm totally open to the idea that cities could be overcharging for utility pole access -- that a few cities abuse the hell out of this authority and that this should be corrected. But the FCC's rule forces Portland to drop the rent from $250/month to just $22/month. At this extremely low price point, I suspect the city of Portland would actually be subsidizing the majority of these site costs for cellular providers, at the expense of their city's budget. For comparison, it costs something like $2k to $3k just to build or replace a single pole (in cheap low-CoL suburban areas, using cheap wood non-metal poles). At $22/month, if a pole was used by Verizon alone, a city wouldn't break even on the cheapest possible initial pole costs for about 10 years (and that's assuming it never needs maintenance or repair or temporary movement ever). If cities lose this fight, I would expect them to raise their income taxes and/or property taxes to cover the money the FCC is making them give cellular telecoms.