November 2019

Vint Cerf, a ‘father of the internet’, still isn’t completely sold on 5G

A Q&A with Vint Cerf. 

First question, 5G as a broadband alternative for homes and businesses. You sounded a little down on that.

It’s only because I’m worried about 6 gigahertz versus 28 gigahertz. The studies that have been done from the DoD show the 28 gigahertz is very costly, still requires a great deal of fiber interconnect, and might put us in a poor competitive position with regard to serving the rest of the world.

The Twitter Presidency

When President Donald Trump entered office, Twitter was a political tool that had helped get him elected and a digital howitzer that he relished firing. In the years since, he has fully integrated Twitter into the very fabric of his administration, reshaping the nature of the presidency and presidential power. Early on, top aides wanted to restrain the president’s Twitter habit, even considering asking the company to impose a 15-minute delay on Trump’s messages.

International price comparisons: An area of further research

The keen interest by politicians, regulators, and competition authorities in international price rankings has sparked a series of management consultancies to produce regularly studies that purport to compare and rank prices for mobile wireless services across the world. These rankings, so they claim, are the Swiss Army knife of competition analysis. A country that ranks lower on a list is declared a laggard or noncompetitive and thus supposedly is in need of regulatory intervention. Such claims require scrutiny and further analysis.