Oh for crying out loud. For all that Washington talks tough about getting Americans access to high speed Internet, the “supercommittee” wants to tax new spectrum licensees. That’s just what we need: make it more expensive to build out America’s wireless infrastructure in order to pay for the President and his Cabinet to hand out money to their friends and political supporters. Isn’t that special? Here’s a joint letter against it from a number of industry groups.
Then you’ve got Dick Blumenthal, Al Franken, and Amy Klobuchar, leading the charge for the Democrat-controlled Senate that hasn’t passed a budget in 900 days, but wants to get government involved on what can or can’t be called 4G wireless Internet. Great prioritization here.
Spectrum’s important, though. Merely having access to a solid Internet connection lets Americans ave lots of money every year. Not just from being able to buy online, but also from gathering information, and simply from being able to stay at home. IIA did the math and American families each can save thousands of dollars a year online. And we’re busy regulating, taxing, and harassing firms like Google and AT&T, instead of getting government out of the way of investment. Yes, I’m frustrated.
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I’ve been meaning to write about Sprint and the alliance it’s making with the shady, fringe left. Well, since that alliance is against AT&T, and trying to bring government down on AT&T, they’ve started to do the work for me with their myth busting posts. Part 1 takes down fringe left group Public Knowledge and its testimony to the Senate. AT&T illustrates how absurd it is to criticize the firm for planning to run three networks in parallel: “2G” GSM, “3G” UTMS/HSPA, and “4G” LTE. Guys, this is why we need more spectrum: innovation and growth. But, the radical left would rather we all suffer just to lash out for socialism.
Tech transitions take time. AT&T points out that when the FCC-mandated end of life came for “1G” analog cellular service, there were a million of their customers still using it. Just imagine how many people would be disrupted if the radical left imposed an arbitrary end of life for GSM!
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