It's hard for me to take too seriously the idea that the wireless market is locked up given that its key players didn't exist 10 years ago; what's deceptive about it is, they were rolled up into decades-old brands, and so it seems like "Ma Bell AT&T" set the market for wireless. That's not what happened.
It's also unclear to me how much this has to do with "monopoly power" and how much it is simply the case that mass Internet access is an extremely capital intensive business that will always be led by large companies.
I don't know anything about the history of the wireless market, but it seems to me that it is locked up and (to some extent) capital intensive by virtue of the way that we regulate it.
You can see the amount of money that goes into the auctioning of the bandwidth. You have to pay in the millions of dollars before you can build a single tower.
It is a capital intensive business, and I don't suggest otherwise, but it seems to me that there is absolutely no incentive for any of the major players to innovate, as the market is locked down as soon as a chunk of bandwidth has been bought.
It would be nice if there were another way of structuring it to encourage competition in this particular market. One possibility might be to have a local distributor, and then competing vendors that work through that distributor. That is just of the top of my head, so I'm sure there are problems with it (I can certainly think of a few).
Comments
It's hard for me to take too seriously the idea that the wireless market is locked up given that its key players didn't exist 10 years ago; what's deceptive about it is, they were rolled up into decades-old brands, and so it seems like "Ma Bell AT&T" set the market for wireless. That's not what happened.
It's also unclear to me how much this has to do with "monopoly power" and how much it is simply the case that mass Internet access is an extremely capital intensive business that will always be led by large companies.
I don't know anything about the history of the wireless market, but it seems to me that it is locked up and (to some extent) capital intensive by virtue of the way that we regulate it.
If you look here: http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=auctions_al...
You can see the amount of money that goes into the auctioning of the bandwidth. You have to pay in the millions of dollars before you can build a single tower.
It is a capital intensive business, and I don't suggest otherwise, but it seems to me that there is absolutely no incentive for any of the major players to innovate, as the market is locked down as soon as a chunk of bandwidth has been bought.
It would be nice if there were another way of structuring it to encourage competition in this particular market. One possibility might be to have a local distributor, and then competing vendors that work through that distributor. That is just of the top of my head, so I'm sure there are problems with it (I can certainly think of a few).