The Broadband Future Has Enemies

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[Commentary] T-Mobile’s uncapped video experiment heralds a wireless alternative to cable. But, as usual, the net neutrality eccentrics have managed to upset themselves over the wrong things.

Never mind that T-Mobile here functions less as a gatekeeper than as the supplier of an incentive for video operators to make unlimited video manageable on T-Mobile’s capacity-constrained cellular network. This means, mainly, tagging the data so the network can recognize it. It also means allowing a reduced resolution that T-Mobile calls “DVD quality” but is less crystalline than customers are used to getting over a wired broadband connection. The poor, deranged dears should welcome T-Mobile’s experiment.

A touch disgraceful is that certain full-time cheerleaders who have spent the past 20 years blogging about the Internet still don’t bother to understand anything about pricing or the deadweight loss that comes from charging different users, with different needs and appetites, the same price for a service. What they should care about is competition, the force that ensures experiments like T-Mobile’s and Comcast’s will end up working for consumers. Happily, T-Mobile’s video offering (which the company calls “Binge On”) is exactly the reason we can expect a more competitive future—the convergence of fixed and mobile. That is, pending the Obama administration’s willingness not to get in the way.


The Broadband Future Has Enemies