You'll recall that during their bid to acquire T-Mobile, AT&T repeatedly insisted that there was a terrible spectrum crunch afoot, and they simply would not be able to deploy LTE nationally without gobbling up a major competitor. Roughly a year later and, as we illustrated yesterday, AT&T has shown that they didn't need T-Mobile at all, and was perfectly able to go out and get the spectrum they needed elsewhere. AT&T has completed more than 40 spectrum deals in one year, showing there's really nothing deep pockets can't fix.

AT&T recently spent $1.9 billion to obtain Qualcom spectrum, another $600 to gobble up Nextwave, while pursuing 51 Lower 700 MHz Band B Block licenses, four Lower 700 MHz Band C Block licenses and six AWS licenses all owned by CenturyLink's CenturyTel Broadband Wireless subsidiary. It looks like AT&T has also now struck a new deal with Broadband Wireless Unlimited for 700MHz spectrum in several markets around the country.

Speaking to analysts, AT&T's chief strategy officer John Stankey yesterday acknowledged the company is now well-positioned on the spectrum front -- even before the company starts moving on their new plan to use WCS spectrum for LTE deployment.

"Even under ideal circumstances, getting new spectrum on the market in the next five to seven years is aggressive," Stankey said. "But what we do know is that AT&T is well-positioned now...These deals give us confidence that we can meet our LTE objectives for next two years and they will allow us to deliver competitive performance."

AT&T has a long history of over-emphasizing capacity and spectrum constraints in order to get what they want from regulators and politicians. Capacity was the primary justification for the company's decision to impose overage penalties on DSL users, despite absolutely no evidence those networks experience meaningful congestion. You should note there is never hard evidence provided by AT&T on this front, but somehow that doesn't stop the technology press from parroting chicken little.

Spectrum capacity is also used as a bogeyman, despite the fact that there isn't so much a crisis as there is an inefficient use of existing spectrum -- with AT&T being a major culprit due to their sluggish refarming of 2G spectrum for LTE. While AT&T and Verizon certainly need spectrum -- the pretense that there's a constant "crisis" helps both companies gobble up more than their fair share of this supposedly-publicly-owned resource, reducing competitive market threats.

So the spectrum crisis has been solved -- at least until AT&T once again needs to scare politicians and a gullible press into giving the company what it wants. It should be particularly interesting to see what new bogeyman rears its head when AT&T begins chipping away at regulations so they can hang up on 25% of their DSL users they're simply unwilling to upgrade.