Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> Is The FCC Blocking Wireless Competition?
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| With the nationwide expansion of fiber-optic wiring and digital delivery at
>| the turn of the century, the federal government reclaimed and is still
>| reclaiming large amounts of spectrum.
> `----
>
> http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2007/09/07/is-the-fcc-blocking-wireless-competition
>
I think you need to be very very careful about how these situations are
analysed. The concept of natural monopolies, something understood by
economists, but denied for the past 25 years by the right-wing political
activists, is very important, and needs to be understood from the point
of view of their impact on national economies.
It's very expensive to build infrastructure networks, and wireless
networks are not excepted from that cost. To build multiple, parallel,
wireless networks offering the same capability to customers merely has
the effect of raising the cost by times 'n', where 'n' is the number of
networks, back to the customers.
The proper solution is to have single suppliers of certain
infrastructure intensive activities, and regulate the industries such
that a fair price is offered to users of that infrastructure. To ensure
prices are fair, multiple operators can be granted access to different
geographies, and comparisons can be made between them for best practice.
In the UK, a really good example of this would be the railway network,
which is, again, being run as a 'not for profit' or at least at a fixed
margin, anyway, so that train operators can share the infrastructure
costs between them. This makes best sense for everyone, customers
included, assuming you get the operator right (not sure that we have,
but that is a different problem).
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
|
