> So unless you have 3-5+ of towers in every area what prevents the company which owns them from charging whatever it wants? As pong as that whatever is less than the cost of building a tower yourself?
That's the amount you'd expect them to charge -- the cost of building a tower. That is what they have to recover.
If they try to charge much more than that then it's profitable for someone else to build one.
> It makes about as much sense as having multiple competing rail networks or power lines, the more tower there are the higher overall cost per user.
If you have more towers you can reduce the transmission power of each one and it increases the available bandwidth by reducing signal overlap. If the towers themselves used realtime spectrum auctions then the tower nearest the user could come in with the lowest price because it could use lower transmission power and less spectrum.
You can also very reasonably have competing rail networks or power transmission lines because they don't have to use 100% all the same routes to ultimately still connect all of the same cities. Then some may be more efficient for certain routes but the alternative still puts an upper limit on what they can charge, and provides for redundancy in case one of the lines or networks is unavailable.
That's the amount you'd expect them to charge -- the cost of building a tower. That is what they have to recover.
If they try to charge much more than that then it's profitable for someone else to build one.
> It makes about as much sense as having multiple competing rail networks or power lines, the more tower there are the higher overall cost per user.
If you have more towers you can reduce the transmission power of each one and it increases the available bandwidth by reducing signal overlap. If the towers themselves used realtime spectrum auctions then the tower nearest the user could come in with the lowest price because it could use lower transmission power and less spectrum.
You can also very reasonably have competing rail networks or power transmission lines because they don't have to use 100% all the same routes to ultimately still connect all of the same cities. Then some may be more efficient for certain routes but the alternative still puts an upper limit on what they can charge, and provides for redundancy in case one of the lines or networks is unavailable.