Feld Interviews Feld on Wireless Issues

[Commentary] What if Harold Feld was invited to speak at the International CTIA Wireless Conference? He might get to answer some questions.

1) Q: What are the biggest benefits wireless consumers stand to receive in the next two years?
A: Elimination of handset exclusivity and early termination fees and the freedom to use whatever apps they want and access any content they want.

2) Q: Are the OECD's rankings an accurate measure of US wireless broadband?
A: The problem is that in the US we use the term "broadband" to mean a lot of different things. I don't know how many 11 year olds are doing their homework on mobile phones, for example, the way my son does with our FIOS subscription. Certainly people are using mobile devices for a lot of very cool, sophisticated things - such as avoiding SWAT teams at the G-20 summit with Twitter. So the OECD ranking is very relevant for telling us about a particular - and particularly important — service that has many uses that overlap with mobile, but that mobile simply does not replace (at least for now).

3) Q: How will the existing regulatory structure impact the ability of wireless providers in an all-IP world?
A: As data replaces voice, we need to bring the rules that made wireless voice possible to data. Wireless voice could not become a viable service until Congress passed Section 332 which made mobile voice a telecommunications service with interconnection rights and required in exchange that carriers not mess with traffic. When everything is data, and voice is only an application, we need the same rules for data that we needed for voice. By the same token, we also need to mandate data roaming in the same way we mandated voice roaming - or else eliminate mandatory voice roaming. But we can't pretend that these are different worlds subject to different rules when the network treats them as the same thing and where users expect to use all these services equally.