Chairman Pai: Wired, Wireless Broadband Appear Very Competitive to Him

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai gave definite signals that the FCC may have a different answer the next time it weighs in on whether wireless broadband is a competitor to wired. The FCC under his predecessor consistently said wireless broadband was a potential competitor but not yet one for the purposes of disciplining wired Internet service provider prices.

Chairman Pai was asked about that relative competitiveness by host and American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar Jeffrey Eisenach, who was a member of the Trump FCC transition team. Eisenach asked whether Pai thought that wireless is now a substitute for wireline. Chairman Pai said, for him, at least, "they are very competitive offerings." The "for him" is because the chairman is always careful to separate his views from what the FCC as a whole might conclude based on the fact record before it. But he suggested that fact record could be a strong one. Pai said that as 4G LTE and 5G networks get rolled out and the next generation of Wi-Fi is rolled out, "I think we are increasingly going to see that wireless is not this 'imperfect substitute' for wired connections. It is going to be the dominant means, the preferable means, by which people access the internet."