A number of small carriers have sent a letter to Congress requesting that the Federal Communications Commission be given flexibility to set restrictions on who may bid for spectrum during voluntary auctions. Among the wireless carriers signing the letter were Sprint, T-Mobile USA, and C-spire.

Didn’t take T-Mobile long to take the money and run.

The carriers argue that competition would be limited unless the Federal Communications Commission is granted flexibility to restrict access to the auction by America’s two largest carriers, AT&T and Verizon. AT&T’s vice-president for legislative affairs, Jim Cicconi, raised the concern that restrictions on who can access the auction cannot be described as competitive.

I agree with Mr. Cicconi viewpoint. Can you really call a process competitive when the agency responsible for access to spectrum blatantly wishes to establish bottlenecks for those companies willing and able to provide wireless services? Companies, large and small, should have access to the process. Let the highest bidder for a respective swath of spectrum receives it.

Sprint and these other carriers had years of opportunity to grow their networks; merge if they had to; in order to compete with larger carriers. By restricting the carriers with the larger economies of scale from participating will only mean unserved and underserved communities may be seeing increased prices, more dropped calls, or worse yet, no service.