The fool who wrote the article below is actually against free markets in the communications industry...if he had his way QCOM would certainly not be a $60+ billion mkt cap company today.
Get progressive in telecom
This nation's free-market approach to communications has put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage
By Rick Merritt
EE Times
Jan 29, 2007
The United States needs to rewrite two key parts of its telecom policy. Universal service must be brought into the 21st century to address not the lack of a phone line, but the lack of broadband. In addition, regulators need to realize that the old policy of not picking winning or losing technologies has actually hurt U.S. companies and consumers. That's what Jake MacLeod almost reluctantly said in a recent panel discussion I attended. The chief technology officer of Bechtel Communications Inc. is a pretty soft-spoken, humble man. But he also has broad and deep experience building wired and wireless public networks around the world, so he has seen what has and hasn't worked.
"The U.S. did an exceptional thing when it put in place its universal service policy," MacLeod told about 300 executives gathered at the annual Wireless Communications Association International meeting in San Jose, Calif. "Because of this policy, the U.S. leaped way ahead of the rest of the world in telephone service," he added.
But the policy has outlived its usefulness. The vast majority of Americans now have phones, often many of them. But Washington still collects an estimated $7 million a year in fees to support the universal service program. About $4 million of those fees get plowed back into landline telephony--a waste, MacLeod suggested.
Instead, that money could go into building wireless networks to bring broadband service to many of the rural parts of this country that still depend on dial-up, if anything, to get to the Internet. That's because access to the Web--not a phone--is today's new progressive birthright.
"There's no need for a digital divide in the U.S. or anywhere, but the rules of universal service need to be rewritten," MacLeod said.
Similarly, it once made sense for government not to pick technologies. That's the job of the marketplace, or so this old thinking went.
Then came cell phones. Europe mandated GSM and wired up with world-class service at the lowest cost.
In the free-wheeling United States, however, companies and consumers bought into five different and incompatible cellular systems. They took forever to deliver low-cost, widely available service with roaming.
Today the wireless world stands on the brink of fourth-generation services. They will all generally carry broadband data and voice. They will use orthogonal fre- quency-division multiplexing and multiple antenna technologies, and they will all be based on Internet Protocol.
If regulators do nothing, Americans will probably build several systems in parallel and slog through years of messy incompatibilities and high prices. If we develop policies that mandate--or even just strongly encourage--one set of players over another, we could more quickly build an infrastructure that becomes a platform for a world of relatively low-cost, innovative services.
The European GSM juggernaut "beat us to death," MacLeod complained. "Someone has to become the sacrificial lamb, step up and say, 'This is the way it's going to be,' but we are just farting around," he said. I'd guess about three-quarters of the room was ready to nominate him for Congress at that point.
This CTO is right. With a little progressive policymaking this country could be more than the place where so many great technology ideas are born. It could also be a place where they get brought to life on a giant scale.
In an increasingly competitive world, the technology industry would benefit enormously if U.S. regulators adopted such progressive policies. Without them, places like Europe, Japan and South Korea have become the hot spots tech execs point to when they are giving examples of the latest in wireless or broadband technology.
A few more years of our aging policies and cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Bengaluru will be the techno-elites.
Link:
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