SoftBank Close to Announcing Merger Deal for Sprint, T-Mobile
Mobile carrier consolidation has been one of the major failures of antitrust regulators.  Looking back to the Sprint&#x2F;Nextel merger, plans and pricing both declined in customer value severely in the months after the merger closed, with in-plan minutes going from the thousands down to the hundreds for the same price.<p>I would strongly prefer that any consolidation such as this be allowed only if one of the firms return all of its spectrum licenses to the FCC to be re-auctioned.  It&#x27;s fine to merge to consolidate infrastructure, but the unfair aspect of market power is derived from the natural scarcity of spectrum.<p>The hardware cost of launching a mobile carrier in an urban environment is falling rapidly, so only spectrum scarcity is preventing upstarts from disrupting the most lucrative urban markets.