Managing carrier restrictions in a wireless network

Techniques described herein may be used to manage a wireless telecommunications network that is subject to carrier restrictions. In a handover procedure, a source base station may assign an alternative primary carrier to a user device if the current primary carrier (or a secondary carrier thereof) is prohibited by a target base station. An unpaired downlink carrier may be aggregated to the alternative primary carrier as a supplemental downlink (SDL) carrier. New primary carriers may be created by joining unpaired downlink carriers with unpaired uplink carriers. New primary carriers may include a high frequency downlink carrier and a low frequency uplink carrier. New primary carriers may be allocated to wireless devices within a coverage area based on device type and/or a signal propagation quality of each wireless device.