Wireless Markets getting more concentrated.

Country	HHI Index, 2009
China	6,772
Portugal	5,843
Switzerland	4,296
South Africa	4,152
Turkey	4,076
Japan	3,591
Spain	3,401
United Kingdom	3,401
Russia	3,383
France	3,346
US - Proposed	3,320
Canada	3,247
Italy	3,243
Israel	3,115
Germany	2,936
Australia	2,853
Taiwan	2,801
US - Now	2,744
Argentina	2,499
Brazil	2,396
India	1,614

New York Times-  "The AT&T-T-Mobile merger would increase the concentration of the cellular industry in the United States to 3,320, by the HHI scale, up from 2,744 before. But even if the merget does not occur, the American wireless market is and will remain highly concentrated.
 The merger would move the United States from “toward the bottom to well in the middle of the pack” in terms of consolidated market power in the wireless industry, said Eli Noam, an economist at the Columbia University Business School and director of the telecommunications research institute.

In telecommunications, the market concentration itself is not surprising. The telephone business, after all, has long been one of the classic examples of an industry that exhibits the forces that lead toward “natural monopolies,” or at least oligopolies. Those forces include high fixed costs — the investment needed to build out networks — and the efficiencies that come from providing services to millions of customers.

The drive to build out more sophisticated, higher-speed wireless networks will considerably increase the capital costs for network carriers. “That will almost certainly increase the natural forces of market concentration,” Mr. Noam noted.

But if markets are inevitably concentrated, Mr. Noam said, the policy challenge is to make the big players compete in the interests of consumers. “There are ways,” he said, “to prevent monopolists or oligopolists from becoming lazy.”

The three options, Mr Noam explained, are regulation, antitrust and doing nothing — betting that technological change will shake up markets.

The Justice Department is betting on options two and three. By blocking the merger, it hopes to keep the assets of T-Mobile out of AT&T’s hands. Those assets — in whole or in part — will pass to one or several companies, enhancing competition and choice, in theory."
source: NEW YORK TIMES.