I've been in the industry for about a decade. All of the issues you're talking about stem from the confusion about whether telecom networks are private or publi

I've been in the industry for about a decade. All of the issues you're talking about stem from the confusion about whether telecom networks are private or public assets. If telco assets are public, net neutrality and network unification are obvious. If they're private, they're not obvious at all. The industry position is to be public when it's beneficial and private when it's not, which is totally rational and emulated in almost every infrastructure company. The solution is to nationalize the infrastructure and privatize the access but this is politically a non-starter. We will always have a compromise because of the quasi-public/private partnership that is infrastructure. It is better to treat this as a condition of the game theory that governs our universe than it is to complain about the lack of fairness in the system. As far as microcells, they don't really solve the problem of spectrum in aggregate only for individuals and they're, at best, a stopgap solution. Proximal networking is a potential alternative worthy of consideration, but that's at least a few years away right now. Source: I'm a Sprint MVNO and a Telco nut.