We need a mobile broadband space race

[Commentary] An event happened this week that I consider the "Sputnik" of our own age. More than 50 years after the Russians launched the world's first orbiting satellite, HTC on Wednesday launched the HTC MAX 4G -- the world's first WiMax cell phone -- in Russia! Although US carriers are working on 4G and WiMax the nation is way behind in all aspects of mobile broadband. The Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Europeans and now even the Russians are way ahead of the U.S. in the development of next-generation mobile broadband. The U.S. is plagued by spotty service, incompatible technologies and vast regions where no service is possible. The country that invented both the cell phone and the Internet is floundering as a third-rate cell phone Internet backwater. It's time to stop slouching toward failure. Rather than idiotically following Europe and Asia into the future, we need to leapfrog them and put the U.S. back on top. We need nothing less than a new space race-scale effort to build the next-generation mobile data system in the United States. We put a man on the moon a dozen years after Sputnik. Now we need to put fast Internet into every cell phone, no matter where that phone is. I'm not a big fan of big government or new agencies, but this new network is akin to the national highway system, or universal postal or telephone service -- except much more beneficial and important.