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.
