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FCC Chairman Slams Trump Team's Proposal To Nationalize 5G (axios.com)
The Federal Communications Commission's Republican chairman on Monday opposed a plan under consideration by the Trump White House to build a 5G mobile network, nationalizing what has long been the role of private wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon. From the report: "I oppose any proposal for the federal government to build and operate a nationwide 5G network," he said. The FCC's reaction doesn't bode well for the proposal the Trump administration is considering, first reported by Axios on Sunday night, since it's one of the main government agencies when it comes to wireless issues.
because it filled their wallets. This takes money off the table. Whoops.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Just thought I’d mention it since the editors didn’t...
#DeleteChrome
This just comes to show.... the FCC is in the Pockets of the corporate monopolies who are scared of potential competition.
The FCC's job is to be a neutral technical regulator for spectrum and consumer protection --- having a national 5G network would not adversly affect the FCC's ability to do their job, so why are they even commenting?
I can think of only one reason.... the commission is attempting to leverage the fallacy that they are experts in matters of commerce and infrastructure investment to push the administration in the direction of the political goals of their past and future employers: The largest cable companies and Telcos.
I hate Trump and the FCC chairman. How do I know which to oppose on this? ;)
A lawyer for Verizon would oppose nationalizing part of Verizon's business.
What fantasy world do you live in where cellular carriers aren't regularly and enthusiastically turning over data to the government?
I am not sure why it is funny. But Trumps only policy is what seems to Trump up Trump. He isn't a conservative or liberal, he is Trump who just wants himself to look good. He will stick with the people who likes him and complements him, and will betray anyone who makes him seem less then he thinks he is.
This makes him easily manipulative. I have worked with personalities like this in the past, just as long as you weather the temper-tantrums, you can get the person to do whatever you want.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Exactly. Pai has a deep ideological belief in free markets. I'd go so far as to say he has too much faith in free markets. I feel free markets are good when there's enough elasticity in the market for good old-fashioned supply and demand to function correctly. But the telecom industry has a natural tendency to be a monopoly due to the enormous physical plant required to prevent the supply side from reacting to the demand side. In the absence of strong regulatory action, the monopoly will ... what's the euphemism? ... maximize shareholder value.
This is a boring sig
Less government, more free market is only helpful when there's competition in the free market. Back in the 3G days and before, there was competition (GSM/TDMA, CDMA, DAMPS). 4G saw all the carriers adopting LTE. That's a pretty good sign the technology has matured and competition has found the best solution. At that point, the best course of action is usually to turn it into a public utility. Build a single set of wires (or towers in this case), but don't run any service over them. Let multiple companies provide that service, paying for use of those wires/towers. That competition keeps prices low, as well as keeps a finger in the free market pie in case someone comes up with some new breakthrough.
Electricity is a good example. When it was first developed, nobody knew if AC or DC was better for long-distance transmission. Edison (DC) and Westinghouse/Tesla (AC) built competing electrical systems - entire cities were wired up with AC or DC electricity. Since the government didn't know which was better either, the smart thing for it to do was to stay out of it and not try to regulate it.* Both systems competed, and it soon became clear that AC was superior. Pretty soon all electrical systems were AC, and that's when the government stepped in and converted it into a utility. Your local power company built, owns, and maintains the wires. But in most jurisdictions you can purchase your power from any number of electricity providers. Those providers pay the owner of the wires a fixed rate, set by the local or state's public utilities commission.
* GSM is a good example of how to screw this up. The EU government regulated too quickly when it developed GSM and mandated it as the standard all EU phone companies had to adopt. GSM was based on TDMA - each phone took turns talking to the tower. That worked fine in low-bandwidth applications like voice, but once cellular data became the hot commodity, it was terrible. GSM wasted data bandwidth by allocating it to phones which didn't some or all of it. Fortunately the US didn't adopt GSM and let cell phone companies come up with their own systems. A few tried CDMA - each phone transmits simultaneously, and the tower tells them apart via orthogonal coding (kinda like writing on a sheet of paper, then turning it 90 degrees and writing on it some more - the letters are orthogonal enough that you can distinguish the vertical ones from the horizontal ones). With CDMA, each phone sees the transmissions of the other phones as noise, which raises the noise floor and reduces the signal to noise ratio, automatically dividing the available data bandwidth between all transmitting phones. It completely blew GSM out of the water. Enough so that within a year GSM threw in the towel and was amended to include wideband CDMA for data. That's why CDMA networks got 3G data about a year before GSM networks. That's why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time - they had a TDMA radio for voice, and a second CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones only had a single radio for both voice and data.
So 5G is a good candidate for converting the cellular network into the utility model.
Are you trying to claim Trump is more coherent than Obama? Trump loses his train of thought mid-sentence all the time when giving speeches.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/op...
https://www.theguardian.com/tv...
I love this example of a Trump speech:
“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
https://www.snopes.com/donald-...
https://www.theguardian.com/tv...
Here are some more examples:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and...
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