Re: Race to the bottom
Getting rid of a speed bump isn't a race to the bottom. it's a race to a marginally more competitive market. I'm a huge fan of charging as much as absolutely possible for everything, but that doesn't apply to utilities. Communications companies are utilities, no matter how much they'd like you to believe otherwise.
Termination fees have always been a sideways effort to screw taxpayers. A government makes a big show out of auctioning spectrum, then provides (one of many) ways for the licensees to recoup that investment without actually competing for customers, which is a huge part of the justification for the auctions in the first place: Making a significant investment in spectrum will force competition between licensees.
It's paying lip service to competititive markets, but undermining the entire premise by reducing the need for competititive strategies amonst licensees. Which is why they've never spent more on infrastructure than they absolutely had to in order to meet the terms of thier licenses, don't buy into the bullshit that they would improve on that if they could. They've got much less reason to be competititive when they can generate revenue from doing nothing more than what they agreed to do in order to participate in spectrum auctions.
Lastly, there's more wireless (and broadband) infrastructure in the greate Washington D.C. area than in all of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland combined (really). There's simply zero justification for all the bullshit you guys deal with to be able to communicate with each other. You're getting just absolutely fucked by the service providers and your government and it all, 100% of it, just flies in the face of capitalism, competititive markets and even reason. The coverage area is tiny, there's no rough terrain to speak of and the entire area is already so covered up with incredibly overbuilt primary infrastructure that it's a joke that there should be even a whimper to expand coverage for any communications there.
If you want better service you're wasting your time hoping the incredibly lazy bastards who run communications services there and your anti-business government are going to do anything towards those ends. One of the best things that could possibly happen to that entire little section of the world would be for the communications companies to collapse, or just vanish. Somebody else could replace it all in less than a year if they wanted to. None of it represents large, or complex infrastructure.