A broad spectrum of decisions

The world of the Mobile Operator was rocked with the first auctions of 3G spectrum in Europe in the year 2000. The billions of Euros that were paid most notably in the UK and Germany are widely accepted as the main cause of the Telecoms crash of that year. Since then however, the explosion in demand for mobile data seems to have vindicated these purchases but with a new round of spectrum auctions looming for 4G, refarming of broadcast spectrum, and the uncertain future of GSM in a data-centric world, how does an Operator know how much of which they need to serve their mobile subscribers over the next 5 years and will it be worth it? Applying programming techniques to this problem can provide powerful analysis of the best strategy to be followed.