The 5G Wireless Utopia Just 6 Months After the Obama Investment Downer

            Today’s Wall Street Journal continues the commitment to framing a fake, alternative reality in the telecom/Internet ecosystem.  See Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Comcast vs. the 5G Frenzy; available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/comcast-vs-the-5g-frenzy-1499188939.

            Just months after President Obama allegedly engineered an unprecedented decline in broadband infrastructure investment, Mr. Jenkins sees a “frenzy” in superfast fifth generation wireless network rollouts and a “dramatic restructuring of the cable and mobile broadband industries.”

            Wow!  Just a few months ago, the Journal and various sponsored researchers bemoaned the decline in broadband capital expenditures, solely generated by the FCC’s insistence on Mr. Jenkin’s characterized “1934-style utility regulation.” Now, wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon have opened their pocketbooks to invest in new plant, at the same time as they spend billions to acquire content providers like AOL, DirecTV, Time-Warner and Yahoo.

            Here are some inconvenient and ignored truths: Congress mandated common carrier regulation of wireless carriers and that designation has NOT created any investment disincentive.  Broadband carriers have spent billions on content providers surely based on the assumption that ample capacity and transmission speed can accommodate ever growing video demand.  These very same carriers have spent additional billions on radio spectrum.

            So much for the FCC’s frenzy killing network neutrality regulation on investment, innovation and employment.

            Mr. Jenkins implies that the telecom/Internet marketplace will grow even more competitive, apparently not likely to suffer when additional acquisitions reduce the number of national wireless carriers to three and other mergers further concentrate other markets.  If not now in the new 4G environment, the future 5G environment will make wired and wireless networks interchangeable.

            Maybe, but Mr. Jenkins seems to ignore additional inconvenient truths.  Unlimited wireless—now and in the future—does not truly fit the term.  Unlimited plans have limits which if exceeded result in a major degradation of service to second or third generation network speeds that cannot provide video carriage. This occurs when a subscriber exceeds a cap of 20-30 Gigabytes and when the top few percentage power users take service from a congested tower. Wireless carriers also down-convert high definition video streams from 1080 lines of resolution to 480 lines.

            Currently, wireless carriers do impose hard and soft data caps while wireline carriers do not, or have a soft cap at more than 500 Gigabytes. Now, wireless carriers charge substantially more than wireline carriers on a per Gigabyte rate. We will see true intermodal competition when wireless broadband subscribers do not bother to program their smartphones to shift from their wireless carriers to available Wi-Fi options.

            So for the time being, Mr. Jenkins has lobbed yet another canard to discredit skeptics of an unregulated marketplace and to vilify network neutrality advocates.