Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz writes that
In Japan, wireless technology works so well that teenagers draft novels on their cellphones. People in Hong Kong take it for granted that they can check their BlackBerrys from underground in the city’s subway cars. Even in France, consumers have more choices for broadband service than in the U.S.??
The Internet may have been developed in the U.S., but the country now ranks 15th in the world for broadband penetration. For those who do have access to broadband, the average speed is a crawl, moving bits at a speed roughly one-tenth that of top-ranked Japan. This means a movie that can be downloaded in a couple of seconds in Japan takes half an hour in the U.S. The BMW 7 series comes equipped with Internet access in Germany, but not in the U.S.
Then he adds that the economic stimulus package before Congress will not fix the real reason the U.S. now ranks 15th in the world for broadband penetration because
nothing in the legislation would address the key reason that the U.S. lags so far behind other countries. This is that there is an effective broadband duopoly in the U.S., with most communities able to choose only between one cable company and one telecom carrier. It’s this lack of competition, blessed by national, state and local politicians, that keeps prices up and services down.
A couple of observations come to mind.
One is that the U.S. has the most successful wireless market in the world. Cellphone calls are significantly less expensive on a per minute basis in the U.S. (6 cents per minute) than in France (17 cents) or Japan (26 cents), according to the FCC’s latest analysis of wireless competition (Table 16). U.S. mobile subscribers continue to lead the world in average voice usage by a wide margin.
The explanation for why fourth generation wireless technology is further along in Japan than it is here would have to include the fact that the Japanese government years ago decided to make leadership in 4G wireless technology a national priority and invested heavily with taxpayer money (see, e.g., this).
This is a form of industrial policy, which involves picking winners and losers, and it is how the Japanese do things. Back in the late 1980s or early 1990s the Japanese government decided Japan needed to be the world-leader in high-definition television, which prompted some in our own government to argue we couldn’t afford to let that happen, so we needed a public-private partnership and a national high-definition television transition plan (which some now want to postpone).??
The good news is that AT&T, Clearwire and Verizon Wireless have all successfully acquired spectrum for the rollout of their own 4G services over the next couple years without government subsidies and oversight.??
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.