The Wall Street Journal reported back on 27 March 2012 that Sprint has plans to offer 4G phones on an LTE network. Given the time and energy the company wasted trying to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, it’s about time.

It’s good to see from a broadband adoption standpoint that Sprint is deploying a network that can help the company deploy these advanced mobile devices. If it can leverage a price strategy that gets the company more customers at a lower price to consumers, all the better. Lower prices charged to consumers keeps them connected.

Law professor Susan Crawford wrote a post for Wired.com arguing that H.R. 3309 would take the FCC in the wrong direction by gutting the agency’s power. After giving a brief history of deregulatory efforts and market entry spawned after the signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Professor Crawford concluded that,

“You’d think that Congress would want to have an empowered regulator able to do something to protect the country from the rational, profit- seeking depredations of our new generation of monopolists.”

According to Professor Crawford, that new generation of monopolists includes Comcast and Time Warner for high-speed internet access; and AT&T and Verizon for wireless services.

The last thing the FCC needs is any more encouragement to follow an increased interventionist scheme. Just yesterday, T-Mobile USA announced the closing of seven call centers and the layoffs of hundreds of workers. The FCC was asked to consider a projection of job losses and call center closings in its review of the request to transfer licenses from T-Mobile to AT&T.

Instead, the FCC decides to play merger expert and, along with the Department of Justice, forced AT&T and T-Mobile to abandon their merger plans. Just like its net neutrality rules, the FCC never considered market impacts of its decisions. They refuse to carryout and document a market failure analysis before implementing decisions. This is not type of agency that anyone wants to have greater regulatory control.

It should stick to its number one priority: ensuring access to public resources such as spectrum and rights-of-way.

Sprint acting more like a regional carrier

Sprint and AT&T are at it again. AT&T is calling out Sprint on the Kansas City-based carrier’s use of roaming agreements versus building out a network to provide consumers with real facility-based services. Sprint alleges this is good for consumers because the practice allows the company to provide its nationwide service..

Sprint calls this good for consumers? When a consumer purchases the service of a national carrier, the consumer wants the certainty of knowing that her service is being provided point to point by the network of the wireless carrier to whom the consumer forks over its money. What Sprint is doing inefficiently pricing its services if that is the case.

Worse yet, this may also be indicative of Sprint’s continuous poor management; buying 30 million iPhones it apparently can’t build a network out to service the phones on. Hard to believe the FCC considers what Sprint is doing as optimal use of a scarce resource.

Is it really good for consumers and investors that a wireless carrier of Sprint’s size and stature is mismanaging itself into becoming a regional carrier?

David Honig, executive director of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council recently wrote a piece for The Huffington Post discussing how mobile broadband access is contributing toward closing the digital divide between minority groups and white Americans. His piece was written in response to a piece written by Professor Susan Crawford in The New York Times.

Professor Crawford’s position was that the emphasis should be on getting wired broadband services in the home because wireless mobile devices such as smartphones are not practical for citizens needing to write resumes or producers of content.

Overall I agree with Mr. Honig that wireless broadband access is better than no access at all. Yes, wireless networks allow us to produce content that can be sold to generate income and revenue. I think the emphasis, however, should be on production versus just connectivity and consumption of digital content, which is where Professor Crawford may have been going in her piece.

My mom got her first computer a few weeks ago. She sent her first e-mail a couple days ago. Yes, at 68 she is now a pedestrian in cyberspace.

I descend from a line of merchants, with my very first memory having been in my great aunt’s store in the Irishtown section of Basseterre, St. Kitts. My mother worked in that store as well. From time to time the old merchant in her will spring an idea as to how best to put her capital to work. I have no doubt that she will eventually go through the same thought process as she learns how to use her lap top.

My nine-year old son is following his ancestors’ footsteps. The word “career” flows out of his mouth easily and probably more often than most teenage and twenty-something knuckleheads I see running around these days. With a “low on minutes” cell phone to their ear and pants low on their waists, young people today appear to be carrying on the same silly, consumer centric behavior of their parents and grandparents, only this time in digital form.

When I think about the level of unemployment we minorities face in this country and the poor performance of our gross domestic product, all I can conclude is that we have to pursue a different mindset. We are, in the words of my sister, addicted to a narrative that we just can’t seem to shake.

Writing for the MMTC’s Broadband and Social Justice blog, Ava Parker posted a piece that highlights the fork in the road consumers of digital technology now face. Do we continue with a mindset focused primarily on consuming communications and entertainment, or do we start turning our mobile information access terminals into productive capital and use this capital to create another source of equity; equity that allows us to weather the next financial or economic crisis.