My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Telcos as the oil cartel: an apt analogy

tech
by Antonio on

Great op-ed piece in the Times today that argues the case for the FCC to get out of the pocket of the telco lobby to hopefully open up some spectrum.

While I agree that bandwidth may be as important to our emerging information economy as oil was to the industrial one, we'd do well to keep in mind that digital + wireless essentially means that in the long run there should be no scarcity of bandwidth, and that as such there is no natural way for carriers to form a cartel to control supply. Sure rolling out 3G and LTE/4G costs a lot of money in infrastructure up front, but these costs can be recouped in short order. More importantly, the semiconductor companies and Internet powerhouses (think Intel and Google) are well incented to find ways to make cheaper technologies like Wimax work, if only the government gets them the spectrum.

My favorite part of the piece: the title, OPEC 2.0, helps to really contextualize the issue of open spectrum to the regular Joe currently paying $4.30/gallon for gas.