Well, in a nutshell, back in the 80s, there was a fee tacked on to all phone bills for "upgrades" that had listed among other things that everything would be moving to fiber optic. Instead they sort of double dipped. You can read articles like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre perhaps as a starting point, but essentially they charged their customers a special government mandated fee, that allowed them to build it out but not actually have to hook it up anywhere, and then when everyone forgot about this fee and what this really was, then treated as this new asset they could sell off, all while never actually figuring out the last mile problem, which was the heart of the original law to begin with. So now with wireless it is the same thing, where terms get thrown around like "bandwidth" and "capacity" and while they want to, on one hand, say that these are limitations from the FCC or just plain physics, they are actually words to describe the fact that it is their towers, or the connections to the towers, that they purposefully keep limited in order to facilitate very high profit margins. So they tell their customers "have all of this unlimited everything" but they've only built out (of their own equipment mind you) the ability to service 10% maybe of what they sell, so that when people actually start using it, they can then blame the customer, all the while showing ever increasing profits to their shareholders. I would be very very suspect of anything any of the damned companies have to say about their own capacity, and be very careful not to assume that it is the airwaves that are full, but it is really their equipment that they've oversold.