The New York Times editorial "How to Fix the Wireless Market," is embarrassingly uninformed and totally ignores massive obvious evidence of vibrant American wireless competition.
The NYT's conclusion, that more wireless regulation is needed because of "insufficient competition," results from cherry picking a few isolated facts that superficially support their case, while totally ignoring the overwhelming relevant evidence to the contrary.
The NYT completely ignores widely-available evidence of vibrant wireless competition and substitution:
- U.S. wireless customers are getting much more value for less money! The average local monthly wireless bill is down for the same number of minutes and for 111% more data usage!
- U.S. wireless customers use roughly four times more minutes of use than customers in most every other country in the world.
- U.S. wireless customers have more choice of handsets, over 600, than most any nation in the world.
- The U.S. leads the world in next generation 4G subscribers showing that the U.S. is leading in infrastructure private investment and innovation -- obvious indicators of a vibrant competitive wireless market.
Most embarrassing of all is the NYT's myopic fixation on texting and the price per text versus cost, which totally misses the importance of the wide competitive availability of free and better substitutes.
The NYT is ignoring that users can and do use free texting/messaging/communications services via:
- Apple's ichat, messaging or Facetime;
- Facebook's messaging or video chat;
- Microsoft-Skype's calling or video conferencing;
- Google Voice, Hangout video conferencing, Google + messaging; or
- Twitter messages.
Simply, the NYT's claim of insufficient wireless competition is shockingly uninformed -- the editorial board should read its own business technology section more to get into the 21st century, because the era of black rotary phones, and brick-size cellphones has long since passed, as most every other person in America has long recognized.
- At a minimum, the NYT's should get its facts straight before recommending intrusive government intervention and economic regulation of a marketplace that is very well serving wireless customers.
