Also, if you don’t like lock-in, then PAY FULL PRICE for your phone! Phones are expensive and complicated … you want a nice smartphone for $100 or $200, then you get stuck with a contract. This is fucking simple.

Gotta love it. Sell them the frequencies so they can fragment the market with a bunch of incompatable technologies. Then get upset because of anticompetetive practices. The government should have leased the freq to the providers for a moderate or fee and standardized on something like GSM. Then there would be real competition.

DOJ, meet the FCC.

p.s. Legalize more open spectrum!

The simple fact is, per subscriber, mobile towers cost less to deploy, maintain, and extend. How is it that they can have mobile service in african countries yet the amount we pay for it in the west would be completely unaffordable to africans.

On the other hand, if you’re just demonstrating why it isn’t a truly free market, then I agree. :)

To those complaining about prices, while I share your concern, don’t think that the DOJ is about to do anything about that. They might deem them monopolies, but the most that will do is break them up. Cell phone rates are high because people are willing to pay them — that’s what your free market is all about. It’s the same reason you pay $12 for a bag of popcorn and a drink in a theatre — if people are willing to pay it, the companies will charge it and make tons of money.

If you really want cell phone rates to drop, stop using your cell phone. Yeah, I know, you need it — so do I, that’s why I pay it — but it’s the only reason they would ever start to drop prices. As long as you “need” it, they’ll charge you as much as you’re able to pay.

AT&T – $20 a month for 1,500 text… OUTRAGEOUS

I hope you’re not suggesting that spectrum should be completely open. If so, imagine the engineering nightmare that would cause. Nearby towers vying for channels, trying to overpower each other. Just look at WiFi — it’s forced to use this model and it results in noisy signals all around and terribly inefficient use of what spectrum is available.

Perhaps you’re not familiar with cognitive radio and software-defined radio?

Read The Myth of Interference by David Weinberger interviewing David P. Reed.

“Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature.”

Cell phone rates are high because people are willing to pay them — that’s what your free market is all about.

Lack of competition due to government-created barriers to entry is not what a free market is all about.

FIGHT ATT RATES!

BREAK UP THE TELECOM MONOPOLY!

Love, 1982

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System_divestiture

But… but… how can this be? When markets are free everybody wins! I don’t understand…

Because there’s no free market for using the radio spectrum. The FCC is a captured agency selling monopolies to rent-seeking telecommunications companies.

Just as Ma Bell / AT&T got their monopoly via regulatory capture from the Universal Service Mandate.

If we had completely open spectrum, then we’d see real free market competition in wireless telecommunications.

I remember some of the history of Standard Oil getting broken up..but I think it just created fragment corporations that all worked together.

I’d expect ATT to do something like that if they got told they’re a monopoly. So nothing changes, except they can’t be called a monopoly.