Keep up the competition in telecom industry

AT&T’s and T-Mobile’s decisions to allow more frequent device upgrades (“AT&T introduces option for faster phone upgrades”, July 16) is further evidence of the growing competition for consumers in the wireless market. Soon there will be four national providers of 4G LTE service that offers mobile broadband speeds of up to 20 Mbps — speeds fast enough for virtually any video or other Internet application. Most Americans can also choose between telephone and cable broadband providers. Now, 85 percent even have access to broadband networks capable of lightning-fast speeds of 100 Mbps.

Only one other country on the planet has three kinds of fully deployed broadband networks. And that’s pretty impressive. We owe a lot of credit on this to former President Bill Clinton, who set in place in his 1996 Telecom Act an approach that required these three kinds of broadband technology to compete against each other. And that competition has spurred unprecedented investment. Wired and wireless data providers have invest $250 billion since the Great Recession began — more than Big Oil and Big Auto — to continue improving these networks and compete for customers.

Washington’s goal now should be to see how we can continue this kind of brass-knuckled competition between all of these technologies that was started by the Clinton administration and how best to incentivize the investment spawned by that competition. Roger Campos

President & CEO

Minority Business RoundTable

Washington, D.C.