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There's enough spectrum in sight to double the number of state of the art U.S. mobile networks. To facilitate that, the FCC should immediately change the auction rules that are a huge obstacle to competition and almost certainly reduce the amount collected. In most of the world, part of the spectrum fee is paid over time. In the U.S., it all has to be paid up front, three or four years before significant revenue (the network has to be built) and even more years before breakeven. With U.S. licenses going for $5B and more, that's a hell of a lot of cash to tie up without even a hint of return. That's a huge obstacle for most bidders, who would gladly pay more if the spectrum payments were more closely tied to when they have income. A new network competing with powerful V & T has to be considered speculative, which means their cost of borrowing the spectrum fee money for the three years of construction is very high.

In addition, even if the bid made sense, there are very few able to front $5B except the incumbents. So the current auction rules are an incumbent protection plan, especially valuable to the larger incumbents, V, T, and Deutsche Telekom. Verizon and AT&T made that clear by bidding up and if necessary buying spectrum in the last few auctions that they didn't really need. They and Sprint have enormous amounts of spectrum not in use, so this was preemptive to keep new companies out.

Or maybe, as Genachowski fears, V & T scale will dominate no matter what the FCC does.