Google Fiber pull-back shows broadband is difficult. But 5G will make it much easier.

[Commentary] Recently, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson plainly acknowledged Google’s victory in the biggest tech policy debate of the last 15 years: “On neutrality. You guys from Google, you won. It’s done.” Yet the sad irony is that Google’s “win” on policy — the imposition in 2015 of old and voluminous monopoly telephone rules onto modern broadband — made Google’s own broadband deployment efforts even more difficult. We have long said that Title II regulation would make broadband less competitive, and Google’s exit of the business is evidence of this effect.

Fifth-generation wireless, or 5G, is a suite of technologies that will be the foundation of the Internet, and of most of the economy, for the next 20 years. It includes more advanced air interface protocols, new “software defined” network architectures, use of huge new swaths of high-frequency spectrum, and deployment of millions of small cells, all of which will dramatically expand coverage and capacity. But not just for mobile. 5G will also power connected cars and the Internet of Things. It could even become a real competitive offering for fixed residential broadband, delivering both interactive Web video and TV-like high-definition video the way only cable and fiber-to-the-home do today. 5G could be powerful enough to deliver a video service on par with cable TV or broadband. Satellite will still have an important role for high definition TV, but 5G can overcome satellite’s limited capacity for interactivity (given the latency incurred over the 46,000-mile round trip to space and back). This new competitive broadband service might be enough to push the AT&T-TW partnership over the line with regulators. And it should also serve as a warning to future market meddlers at the FCC: technology is almost always far more powerful, and pro-consumer, than clever attempts to shape yesterday’s markets.

[Bret Swanson is president of Entropy Economics LLC]