Why you shouldn’t buy the miracle broadband network Softbank’s Masayoshi Son is selling

[Commentary] When SoftBank CEO and Sprint chairman Masayoshi Son gave a well-received talk on deplorable state of the Internet in the US, he never mentioned T-Mobile directly.

However, the subtext was there: if regulators let him get his hands on T-Mobile, he wouldn’t just make the US mobile landscape the competitive, but the entire realm of Internet access.

Give me T-Mobile and I’ll give you a competitor to Comcast-Time Warner, was the message Son delivered, and everybody seemed to eat it up.

I think Son is being pretty disingenuous here. He simply can’t deliver the network to meet those promises. Here’s why.

Mobile and wireline broadband networks are fundamentally different animals, and no matter how much wireless technology improves you’re never going to pump the same amount of capacity through a cellular connection that you would through its wireline equivalent. Son argued that today’s average LTE connection -- at 6 Mbps -- is just as fast as the home broadband speeds many Americans have today (though as The Verge’s Chris Ziegler pointed out, he seemed to be making up numbers), but Son is conflating speed with the cost of capacity. The way people use their home broadband connections simply can’t stand up to today’s mobile technology and today’s mobile business models.

When looking at the technology involved, Son also stands on tenuous ground. Mobile and wireless technologies will gradually get faster and more powerful, evolving to a point where we may some day be able to consume data over wireless connections as indifferently as we consume over the wireline connections. But that kind of scenario involves much more than the cellular networks Sprint could provide.