As the world gets ready for 5G today, some cellular networks and a few consumers still have 3G technologies even though they are obsolete. 3G, introduced more than 15 years ago, does not offer enough speed or capacity for modern consumers’ thirst for video and life-changing apps. Many service providers are providing significant financial assistance and incentives to enable consumers who remain on obsolete 3G technologies to leap to 5G. Any delay of the 3G sunset would hold back many underserved people from being able to enjoy the benefits of the new technology and render them second-class internet citizens. Perhaps most importantly, sunsetting 3G and moving to 5G will increase network reliability and make for better location accuracy, even vertical location. To enable these and many other societal benefits, wireless carriers started announcing plans to sunset their 3G networks years ago. As with the analog sunset of 2007 and the digital television transition of 2009, there are those who don’t want change for self-serving reasons and there is talk of delay — even though the evolution has been underway for years. But consumers know better. In fact, every day thousands of consumers are replacing their clunky old 3G phones with powerful new 5G devices. We should continue moving forward with the transition to 5G so we can get to our mobile future faster.

[Robert McDowell served as a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission from 2006 to 2013. He is a partner with Cooley LLP and co-leads its global communications practice which includes wireless, technology, and broadcasting companies, among others.]

While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company discreetly announced to the world’s computer networks a startling development: It now was managing a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military. What happened next was stranger still. The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That’s almost 6 percent of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate — called IPv4 — where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market. The entities controlling the largest swaths of the Internet generally are telecommunications giants whose names are familiar: AT&T, China Telecom, Verizon. But now at the top of the list was Global Resource Systems — a company founded only in September that has no publicly reported federal contracts and no obvious public-facing website. The change is the handiwork of an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. The DDS bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” tasked with solving emergency problems for the department and conducting experimental work to make big technological leaps for the military. Brett Goldstein, the DDS’s director, said that his unit had authorized a “pilot effort” publicizing the IP space owned by the Pentagon.