>Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have ac

>Today, if 500 people in a room use T-Mobile phones, but Verizon owns all the spectrum, then nobody gets to use anything. This is stupid. Verizon should have access to a fraction of spectrum proportional to their users in an area. More users, more spectrum, and vice versa. That would require a fairly radical departure from the infrastructure of the existing cellular networks, wouldn't it? Right now, each provider has a monopoly on a portion of the spectrum within a defined geographical area, and provides the base station and backhaul infrastructure to support their network. It's not like "Verizon owns all the spectrum in a room"; it's that Verizon has better base station coverage of that room than T-Mobile does. The providers compete on, amongst other things, coverage and network performance. Sharing spectrum would effectively require mutualization of base station infrastructure. You would effectively have a single monopoly with the networks operating as virtual operators. It's very far from clear that would be a good outcome, to me, at least.