Well, a government monopoly would be more efficient than a system where the government pays private enterprises to do the work because governments are not rational market actors in that scenario. That kind of mixing is literally the worst of both worlds.

Yes, but competition drives efficiency.

They they should use a technology that allows sharing. CDMA works just fine with multiple companies all using the same frequency at the same time.

To be fair, if it weren’t for certain bad actors in the industries all the government would be required to do is set a minimum standard that they have to meet to operate.

Minimums required for health and/or safety. Unfortunately what ends up happening is you get someone in charge who only looks at the money. It’s far easier to make money by removing competition than it is to actually provide a quality service.

Quality actually requires you to, you know, work.

This is a little over my head but I can walk down the street with my verizon phone while my buddies use their ATT, sprint and tmobile phones and they all seem to work at the same time. So how are other companies locked out? I know there are spectrum ranges they can use but are we anywhere near overcrowding those signals?

Straw man. No one said insurance company control is good, either.

Make no mistake, what we call “health insurance” today is not “insurance” by any reasonable definition of the word. It is a pre-paid medical plan that negotiates discounts with health care providers. That’s it. True insurance is supposed to insure against catastrophic loss. Think of the old-school, high-deductible major medical plan that the current administration would call an unqualified insurance plan. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that insurance should be covering office visits, antibiotics, and other basic, day-to-day health care. Those are part of a any sane person’s budget, just like electricity and gas. If you want to know why medical costs are so ridiculously high, there’s your culprit: most consumers don’t pay for anything directly, and therefore competition is not at play.

So how does that get fixed, when insurance companies have a stranglehold on the market?
1. Tax health benefits. I know it sounds awful, but if you want to encourage people to select benefit plans that are reasonable and remove control from the insurance companies, that’s the way to do it. Besides, only employer pre-paid plans are tax exempt, anyway. So why do employees get special treatment that the self-employed don’t?
2. Expand Health Savings Accounts. Imagine an account that allows anyone to allocate pre-tax dollars for health care. But, unlike FLEX plans, this is not a use-it-or-lose-it plan. All that money is YOUR money, and at retirement, you can use it for anything, tax-free. Before retirement, you can use it for health care, tax-free. But, it’s YOUR money that YOU have to spend, meaning that you are much more likely to hunt for the best balance of price and quality instead of being oblivious to it.

Another nice benefit of HSA is that employers can contribute to it. By combining HSA contributions up to the deductible with a high-deductible major medical and no day-to-day coverage, an employer can offer that same out-of-pocket experience as a much more comprehensive plan, but at a fraction of the premium. Not only that, high-deductible plans are much less susceptible to premium increases from year to year.

That option would put a lot more control back in the hands of individuals without requiring massive government intervention. Intervention which, in most cases, is less effective, more expensive, and has more unintended consequences that are ever anticipated up front.

Look up Oligopoly. That’s what you are describing.

Uh, economies of scale is a thing. Look it up, that’s what they’re arguing. It is basic economics. This is why monopolies are not always bad: see utilities.

Agreed. I think most all “infrastructure” should be public. Bandwidth is infrastructure.

At least then the prices would be high due to bureaucratic incompetence, rather than outright malice. Easier to swallow.

“the technology, while still obviously evolving, has matured to the point where it’s a ‘utility’ and needs to be regulated by the government as such. Declare one standard, declare that phones must be multi-frequency so a device can, if not locked, function on any US network. Require providers to unlock devices sold at full price, require providers to unlock devices after contract period ends for ‘discounted’ devices.”

I’d like to amplify that. If the FCC was better at doing its job, or was even interested in doing it, they would manage the spectrum better. But the real need is for wireless signal carriage to be treated more as a common carrier situation.

But the spectrum is locked down in a given area. A company may have the sole rights to use the 1.8GHz spectrum in a given area and even if they have excess capacity in that area, no one else is legally allowed to use that bandwidth.

If that’s the case in the states it’s very different from the UK…. air is air and the permission bit for a providor is being allowed to erect a cell tower in the area, which mostly only get blocked by resident protests… most of the major providors cover over 90% of the country to some signal level