why is spectrum so expensive? only Goliath size corps can afford it.
Or to phase that another way: There is a lot of spectrum. But very little spectrum that is suitable for mobile phone usage. When a resource is finite and valuable, it gets expensive.
If you want a "real" solution that would allow startups to play in the ballpit? Pass new national laws which split the cellular companies into two organisations, one that offers consumer services, and another which exists to maintain/install/upgrade the physical cellular network (and who then resells access).
It actually makes little sense to have competing and exclusive cellular infrastructure. The infrastructure should just be like a public resource, like a road, and the cellphone companies should be like shipping companies, utilising a public resource (the road) to sell a service (shipping stuff).
I'd be all for the government using eminent domain to seize every single cellphone tower in the country, and then reselling access to them to every cell phone company equally. But it isn't very capitalist...
Yes, that does mean that you end up with mega-corps providing your cellular service. But the same is true for say retail. Amazon will eat the whole industry. Physics as well as economics strongly favor mega-corps. Startups have advantages, but specific and narrow ones.
[1] See https://www.scribd.com/doc/292530059/Spectrum-Allocation-Loc...
This is similar to the approach that some countries used when privatizing railroad companies: Instead of creating a new private company that's effectively a monopoly, they created one company that provides the infrastructure and another company that runs the trains. This allowed new private companies to enter the market, as they were allowed to use the resources under the same conditions as the former monopoly.
I personally would be less than pleased to have to pay extra on an ongoing basis just to have a wifi router in my home, or a wifi radio on my laptop. Extending private property rights into what is currently a commons would seem to imply that though.
Here in New Zealand we have three providers, but we have national number portability. This means I can switch networks with no fees (unless I have a contract with a termination clause) and no number downtime. It helps competition a lot.
Number portability is already possible here in the US, and so long as I am not on a contract I can switch without fees.
Sure, this will even the playing field for coverage, but it won't even it for anything else (customer services, device financing, cost, et al). Plus actual network costs have little relation to what companies can charge, since all cellular companies over-sell their network.
I'm sure with this there will be companies that offer terrible customer service, and price their offering dirt cheap. That's fine. But most consumers will want to find a happy medium between the quality of service Vs. the cost.
That was the shape of the cellular networks in the UK in the early days of mobile telephony, IIRC.
There would suddenly appear to be huge amounts of available spectrum if the authorities would just yank bands from the most useless legacy allocations and auction them off.
I also suspect that the users of that spectrum (save for the military which has a huge amount of lightly used spectrum) might disagree with you as to how useless their technology is, I mean would you take the spectrum currently held for ham radio operators and sell it off?
Navigation (GPS) is pretty spectrum efficient, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at there.
All the legacy nonsense needs to be ruthlessly eliminated. People claim frequency auctions are efficient but that's clearly not the case if you are only auctioning .1% of whats useful and allocate the remainder to waste on a free cost basis.
Much of what's in that band is allocated for point to point microwave and satellite, I'd also caution you, one mans 'wasted spectrum' is another 'vital important service' both of which can be technically correct at the same time.
As you mention police, I'll also point out public service frequencies (Part 90) recently went to 12.5kHz bandwidth (half what hams use) and there is discussion of going even further.
The really legacy allocations like broadcast TV, AM radio, and radionavigation are in spectra that Johnny Startup probably isn't interested in. Data rates are pretty slow at 30kHz.
This is totally true! And it was a "junk" band to begin with. What if they allocated another unlicensed band that had room for 3-4x as many exclusive 802.11 channels as the current one?