How? ATT and Verizon control the spectrum.

there have been several stabs at similar problems using unlicensed spectrum; you pay people to use wimax or wifi wireless routers running software you provide. Your software allows your other customers to connect to the internet through those routers. From there it's easy enough to provide voip phone service. If you control the software on the routers, it's easy enough to set up authentication so only third parties that pay you can connect, and to rate-limit those third parties to something reasonable.

But it's a difficult thing to carry off. Several companies, I believe, have tried and all have failed. (I can't remember the names of any of those companies right now; I don't know if that's 'cause I'm tired, or if that's 'cause I'm actually remembering a conversation about a business that someone wanted to start that never happened, or if I'm just making this up wholecloth. None the less, it seems like a direction from which you could attack the market using unlicensed spectrum. You would have many obstacles, but it seems possible, at least in high-density urban areas.)

Cringely proposed that Wal-Mart install wimax routers in every store and thereby essentially blanket the country in coverage. I don't know enough about wimax or wimax phones like the HTC Evo to know if you could provision any wimax router to make voice calls, but I do like the thought that someone in an entirely different business could disrupt the ridiculous monopolistic profit machine that is today's cellular market.

Do you have a link to this? I'd like to read more.

Thanks!

If I knew, I would have worked on it or shared the idea here.

As long as spectrum is controlled by the government (FCC), ain't going to happen.

Agreed. If the spectrum had been treated like other property all along, owners would have a strong incentive to figure out how to carry more data.

Landowners have a similar incentive. And, where it makes sense to do so, we see buildings that are many stories high, effectively using the same land many times over for the same purpose.

But in spectrum, we have spectrum lying around unused, while emergency services can't even get usable spectrum to save your butt in an emergency. Its well known that cops and firefighters couldn't even be alerted to leave one of the towers.

And this problem has still not been solved. But they can buy land with no problem.