

Apple is testing its own phone service - jsnathan
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/3/9089911/apple-mvno-phone-service-being-tested-report

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Someone1234
I know this is borderline socialism, but I wish the federal government would
mandate that wireless spectrum holders could no longer sell DIRECTLY to
consumers, in the same way that car manufacturers can no longer sell cars
directly to the public (and have to go through dealerships).

Imagine, for a second, if AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile had to split their
companies into the arm that maintains the towers/infrastructure/etc and the
arm that resells to consumers. These two companies would have no formal
relationship, and would have to form new contracts which put a dollar price on
spectrum access, which the retail arm then resells to consumers with bundled
phones/support/value-adds/etc.

Now smaller companies can fairly compete and even larger companies like AT&T's
retail arm could utilise multiple pieces of infrastrastructure to improve
their service area and signal. Essentially you're unbundling the retail
business from the core infrastructure society now relies upon, but you aren't
nationalising them, they're still privately owned, and the shareholders would
just get shares in each of the split companies.

There are multiple examples of this already: roads, railways, airports,
electricity/gas/water, and so on. But this time you're accomplishing the same
thing without the need for nationalisation.

Right now having the retail and infrastructure parts of the business together
in single companies is actually hurting the US's competitive landscape, since
the retail part will only expand the infrastructure just as much as they NEED
to and barely more. However, if the infrastructure part made all of their
money from just infrastructure, they'd have more motivation to keep pushing
that forward, rather than looking at retail changes to accomplish the same
thing. Giving the infrastructure part singular focus/mission/task.

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kozhevnikov
Sounds like BT Openreach, the last mile provider of BT Group, selling to BT
Retail and BT Wholesale on the same terms as any other ISP or phone company in
the UK.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach)

