Originally, this site was born out of the failed AT&T and T-Mobile merger, I wanted to see how much spectrum AT&T would have had if it were complete.
So now we have T-Mo and MetroPCS merging. It makes sense, T-Mo needs to bolster its LTE spectrum, and Metro is a relatively cheap way to do that.
From here, I’d like to see Sprint (after they get bought by Softbank) to buy Leap/Cricket. From there, T-Mo and Sprint can trade spectrum – MetroPCS’s PCS spectrum can go to Sprint (along with a fair amount of cash), Leap’s AWS spectrum would go to T-Mo to finish bolstering their AWS LTE plans. It would set the stage for more band consolidation — the idea that carriers will want to be on as few bands as possible to make the phones easier and less expensive to engineer, and to make it so future phones can operate on all their bands without needing a 12-band RF switch.
On a forward looking perspective, more auctions in different spectrum bands (600MHz, extended AWS-1, AWS-4, 3.6GHz, etc) means that future phones wont be able to support all these bands, plus the ones they support now, plus support international roaming. So we might see band consolidation. Short term movement in this area would be AT&T and T-Mobile trading their PCS for AWS where available – for example, my map shows San Francisco having 25MHz of T-Mobile spectrum in the PCS band after the MetroPCS acquisition. They could trade 5MHz of that to AT&T for 5MHz AWS spectrum in Dallas, TX, for example.
In the long rung, AT&T and Sprint would have 3G and LTE in PCS, plus a lower frequency (700, SMR respectively) and higher frequency (WCS, BRS respectively). Verizon would have LTE in two places (700, AWS) and T-Mobile would have it in one (AWS). I could see T-Mo try to buy up the 600MHz spectrum to try and have both a high and low band for LTE, but beyond that, I don’t see how much more spectrum is needed for the big four.