Most carriers live by the maxim “You can never have enough spectrum.” Now the FCC has adopted a variant: “You can never sell enough spectrum”. Flush from the $19.6 billion 700 MHz auction, the FCC is now examining what other parts of the electromagnetic rainbow it can tap for commercial wireless use. The two prime candidates are new Advanced Wireless Service licenses and, of course, the highly controversial ‘white spaces’ between broadcast channels.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin has scheduled a vote over whether to auction off another 25 MHz of the upper AWS band, but not for the traditional voice and data services of the original AWS sale. Instead, Martin is proposing the winner of said auction would begin an immediate and aggressive roll-out of a nationwide broadband network AND offer service gratis to the end customer. It sounds very similar to the now defunct plans of several muni-Wi-Fi providers, except this would require the operator to actually buy the airwaves it uses. It may sound far-fetched but the FCC has already gotten proposals from at least one company to offer just such a service. M2Z apparently thought enough of the free business model that it took the FCC to court when it rejected its request for the license.

Google founder Larry Page was in Washington this week lobbying the FCC, Congress and anyone else that would listen about the virtues of white space between the 700 MHz spectrum–how it would be an optimal place to shove a new broadband network. The FCC doesn’t appear to be anywhere near a decision on what to do with these nooks between television broadcast channels. It does, however, have the National Association of Broadcasters breathing down its neck to kill such a proposal, while Google pushes for the opposite. Meanwhile it continues to test white space devices, all of which seem to work in the lab, but not necessarily outside of it.

Nokia’s quest to gain greater market share in the U.S. got a welcome boost this week. T-Mobile announced it would launch four new Nokia feature phones this month. Avian securities estimated Nokia has 18% of T-Mobile’s “shelf space”, but that percentage would start inching up in June. T-Mobile is the smallest Tier I operator in the U.S. so Nokifying it handset portfolio won’t have a tremendous impact, but with new CDMA handsets emerging and its support for the new AWS bands, Nokia may see its market share percentages inch up a few points. NPD had Nokia with a No. 4 market share at 8% in Q1, still far behind No. 3 LG Electronics at 17%.

The Cricket EZ phone made the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s recall list this week because of problems establishing audio connections with 911 systems. Leap Wireless, Cricket’s umbrella company, reported the problem to regulators earlier this year and voluntarily recalled the devices. Leap officials said that it started notifying its customers by phone and text about six weeks ago, asking them to come to Cricket store for a firmware upgrade. About 190,000 phones are on the network, the majority of which have been fixed, Leap said.

Ontela’s networked camera phone platform is gaining some momentum among U.S. operators–at least the smaller ones. Cincinnati Bell this week launched Ontela’s photo upload application, which uses the cellular data network to automatically transfer photos snapped with a cameraphone to online photo storage sites or a customer’s PC. Alltel launched the same service in April.

MVNO pioneer Peter Adderton is back. Instead of starting a new virtual operator, though, Adderton is attempting something new, a media and marketing agency dealing in virtual media.

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Has the wireless market in the U.S. finally hit its saturation point? Have we finally “matured” so much that every subscriber add is a steal from someone else’s network and the few remaining souls without a cellphone are just too plain stubborn to not bother with? Do we have to look elsewhere for growth? There are plenty of signs pointing to just that.

A new report from Bernstein Research points out that Q1 net subscriber adds dropped 23% year-over-year, and overall subscriber numbers have fallen from 11.5% to 7.9% in the same period. Further, the NPD Group found that handsets sales volumes dropped 22% in Q1 compared to the same quarter in 2007. It’s eerie how those two percentages match up. Sure, we’re still growing, but the boom days are long gone.

What’s most interesting about this trend, however, is how it will change the fundamental business of wireless. more

Employee emails banning vacation from June to July. Reneged Wi-Fi support. Rumors of subsidies and out of stock handsets. As we grow closer to the one-year anniversary of the launch of Apple’s iPhone, the shady dealings around the handset have grown omnipotent.

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T-Mobile reported 981,000 new net subscribers for the 1st quarter bringing its total up to 30.8 million. T-Mobile continues to make the transition from the tiny Tier I to a large operator in its own right. It was helped along by its the closing of its acquisition of SunCom Mobile in February, which added another 1.1 million subscribers (not included in the net adds) to its roles. Still, T-Mobile has a long way to go to catch up to the big three. AT&T ended the quarter with 71.4 million subs, and Verizon Wireless with 67.2 million. Sprint, the No. 3 and most struggling operator, still hasn’t reported its Q1 results (coming Monday), but it had 54 million customers at the end of 2007. Of course, T-Mobile may being doing a lot better in the customer count in the next few quarters if any of the swirling rumors about Deutsche Telekom buying Sprint prove true–operationally, that would be another story. 

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Is Sprint finally giving up on Nextel? After three years of trying to integrate the iDEN network operator into its business, it looks like it may be throwing in the towel–at least according to the Wall Street Journal.  more

Robert Burst took over as Sprint’s chief financial officer today, and I’m sure he’s had better first days on the job. If Standard & Poor’s cutting Sprint’s credit rating to junk status wasn’t enough, a federal appeals court sided with the FCC, requiring Sprint switch off its iDEN network in 800 MHz in all markets by June 26, regardless of whether the public safety agencies occupying its replacement spectrum are ready to leave. more

Consumers clearly still have mixed feelings about watching full-length features films on their mobile handsets, but the market for using the mobile handset as a universal remote to search for and buy that movie has yet to really be explored. A partnership between CinemaNow and uVuMobile, announced today, aims to change that. The combination of the digital entertainment company and a mobility software and services company will bring about a WAP service allowing consumers to view movie trailers and remotely download the full-length movie to the PC or TV back home.  more

Alltel continues to surprise. On the two-year anniversary of My Circle, Alltel introduced what amounts to the first loyalty program in wireless. If you remain on the My Circle program for two years you get to add another contact to your plan. Those who signed up for the plan two years ago get an 11th number to which they can make unlimited calls. Those who stick around for another 2 years, get a 12th, etc.  more

For those of you who think Apple’s iPhone deal with AT&T looked an awful lot like an MVNO relationship, there’s a reason. Several blogs (MacNN and AppleInsider, to name two) dug through a recently published patent application Apple filed in 2006 and discovered that Apple was considering some kind of hyper-virtual operator business model, in which it would connect to any of multiple different operators on the fly, depending on who could offer the best rates at any given moment.

On one end would be an Apple server that tracked each iPhone user’s location in real time. On the other end would be a gaggle of network operators Apple had resale agreements with. Each would set determined rates for specific regions and for specific times, and the Apple server would sort through that data selecting the cheapest rate at the time for the customers. Apple also made provisions for customers selecting their own operator and accompanying rate plan based on the same data, allowing them to change operators depending on the time of day or region.

That’s all fairly complicated since the typical MVNO signs a network deal with one operator and sticks to it. There is precedence among the large resellers like Tracfone, which sign multiple operator agreements, but I doubt they have the capability to switch between operators on the fly based on real-time pricing info. While those capabilities may be in Apple’s hands right now, the carriers probably aren’t equipped just yet, said Alex Besen, who heads the Washington mobile data consultancy The Besen Group. “Not yet,” Besen said. “As they move toward next-generation networks, they will.”

So will this MVNO model ever appear? It’s doubtful. Apple seems to be doing pretty well with its partnership deals at the moment. And if open access really takes off in the next few years, there may not even be reason to consider it.