The FCC’s rising enthusiasm for shared and unlicensed spectrum options, to boost competition and the range of services available to US users, is placing the MNOs on the defensive. From T-Mobile’s point of view, it is wanting to spend large sums on acquiring Sprint, largely in order to boost its spectrum capacity for 5G, while at the same time, growing amounts of shared spectrum for 4G and 5G could enable challengers, such as cablecos and webscalers, for free. The established operators lost the fight, on balance, in CBRS. They did score some points on the rules for the licences in the PAL (Priority Access Licensed) tier of the 3.5 GHz band, but were defeated in their wish to have very…