Study: Mobile Broadband Growth To Increase Competition

Mobile services in the U.S. are currently very competitive, according to a report (PDF) released Thursday by William Lehr of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The study, which was commissioned by the industry advocacy group Broadband for America, suggests “that the overall impact of mobile broadband will be strongly pro-competitive for broadband services overall, and for fixed broadband access in particular.”

By “enabling the convergence of mobile communication services and the broadband Internet, mobile broadband can enable the creation of markets for wholly new services (e.g., mobile health, location-aware multimedia, and machine-to-machine communications), as well as enhancing the value of existing broadband services by allowing them to go mobile,” wrote Lehr.

“The rapid pace of progress in broadband-related investment in infrastructure, services, content, and applications; and innovation all along the value chain (from services to content to applications to end-user devices) should give us pause before we consider new regulatory obligations on broadband providers,” he wrote.