[markgraydk]

Considering the economic defintion of a natural monopoly, deregulation would be the wrong path to go down. Instead, we should see more regulation like that of "last mile" and caps on or forced wholesale pricing.

I was working on creating an MVNO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_virtual_network_operator) at one point but after crunching the numbers we decided (among other reasons) not to pursue it further. We were looking at handing over about 80% of turnover, even with fairly good laws in place (EU). On top of that, the contracts we were looking at where all based on bundling of services (i.e. XX amount of data, minutes and texts) which would have made our business more of a game of demand estimation. We could perhaps have gotten a small margin if we could estimate what our users would use of services better than what we paid for them wholesale. This has also led to the unfortunate business strategy of most MVNOs around here where they look for a quick exit by being bought out by the infrastructure owner when they have gotten enough customers. Few make it into into black numbers before that.