The Problem with Mobile Broadband

For those who either don’t have access to broadband or who, despite having access, choose to not subscribe because the price is too high, the “answer” to Internet connectivity and access has more and more become mobile broadband.

And that’s not a good thing.

So how did mobile broadband become “the answer” to American’s broadband access and connectivity problem? Rewind to 2010.

Knowing that around 18 million Americans didn't have access to wired broadband, the big mobile broadband players (AT&T and Verizon Wireless) came up with a plan: convince the Obama administration that there was a “spectrum crisis.” And how do you solve a supposed spectrum crisis? Auctioning off reallocated spectrum.

By purchasing the auctioned off spectrum, AT&T and Verizon Wireless argued, they’d be able to effectively provide “high-speed” mobile broadband to those Americans who didn't have access to wired broadband. In turn, they theorized, the Obama administration could kill two birds with one stone: 1) kill the “spectrum crisis” driven by the explosion of smartphones and 2) provide broadband access to those Americans who previously had none.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?

Here’s the problem: While mobile broadband serves a great complementary role in the world of connectivity, it does not and physically cannot supplant wireline access. It’s just an inherent fact in the laws of physics — data transfer speeds through a cable will almost always surpass that through the air. Even worse, despite a recent shift in position from other big tech companies, the concepts of non-discrimination, non-blocking, and other proximate tenants of net neutrality are fairly foreign concepts in the mobile broadband world.

Absent strong enforcement of net neutrality principles, mobile broadband providers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless will have the power, and incentive, to aggressively curate what information and content its subscribers are able to see. In a world where content and delivery-services were separated, that would just be the information from content partners of AT&T and Verizon Wireless. In this model, content partners would pay AT&T and Verizon Wireless for the privilege of reaching their subscriber base. (See AT&T’s Sponsored Data Program).

But, the world we live in is more one where content and delivery-services aren't segregated — the biggest example of this is the Comcast-NBCU merger. In that reality, it’s just the providers, who control the content and information, directly curating what information goes where. There’s no need to create sponsorships like AT&T’s Sponsored Data Program because company’s like Comcast simply control the content in the first place.

What This All Looks Like

To the larger public, the net neutrality debate has only taken place in a limited context — what Comcast or Time Warner Cable is doing to their Internet connection. But, in a world in which mobile broadband is increasingly looked to to solve America’s broadband access problems— largely for those in impoverished and/or rural areas — net neutrality across all platforms is ever more important.

As Nicholas Economides, a Professor of Economics at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, argued in a recent paper, in the absence of net neutrality rules:

[T]here are a large number of vertical anti-competitive concerns…Access networks, if left unrestrained by non-discrimination rules, have incentives to favor their own services, applications, and content and to kill competing services, such as independent VOIP providers,which provide alternative telephone services over the Internet. Additionally, the access networks have incentives to leverage their access monopoly or duopoly market power in many other complementary markets by offering “take it or leave it” contracts.

It’s at this point that net neutrality becomes less a technological issue than one about society.

If you want to have lean on mobile broadband solve American’s broadband access problems, which you shouldn't in the first place, but if you really want to rely on mobile broadband to be that (hopefully temporary) solution, net neutrality almost becomes a social imperative.

Without a holistic approach to net neutrality, we’re allowing AT&T and Verizon Wireless to effectively create a segregated Internet: one, in wireless/mobile broadband, that has its content curated or sponsored by the providers who impose especially egregious data caps for the poor and rural communities and one, in wired broadband, that doesn't have sponsored or curated data, and is relatively fast, but comes at a price that’s unnecessarily tiered and tethered for those in the major markets and those who can afford it. And that runs afoul the basic spirit and premise of the Internet (something President Obama vocalized in 2007).

“What Kind of Day Has It Been”

“[T]he evidence further indicates that market forces alone are unlikely to ensure that the unserved minority of Americans will be able to obtain the benefits of broadband anytime in the near future.”

That’s from the FCC’s Sixth Broadband Deployment Report, published July 2010.

According to the FCC, if it found (which it did) that broadband wasn't being deployed in a timely and efficient manner, then the FCC should “take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.”

The best first-step would be reclassification of ISPs under Title II, which would ensure enforcement of net neutrality principles.

Would this solve America’s broadband access problem?

No.

But it would prevent an effective decoupling of the Internet.

In a larger sense, what it would do is help establish a regulatory framework and ecosystem through which the broadband marketplace became competitive and benefited the American consumer. Indeed, adoption of net neutrality principles would create the regulatory impetus and environment for a level playing field of competition not only for the consumers and content providers, but also for ISPs, large and small. All in all, its about advancing a public utility, a public good.

And this is, effectively, what net neutrality is about. For all of its nuances, technological idiosyncrasies, and internal consternation, the debate on net neutrality, as Tim Wu argued, “is only nominally about packets and bits, and more accurately about what kind of country we want to live in.”