When President Obama appointed former lobbyist and industry insider Tom Wheeler to head the FCC, I wasn’t a fan. But, less than a month after being sworn in, Wheeler is making the right noises and, more importantly, the right moves, like threatening the cell industry with further regulation if they don’t clean up the cell phone unlocking mess.
Wheeler has some big shoes to fill, because interim chairman Mignon Clyburn accomplished a lot in her six months on the job. Clyburn approved the Sprint/Softbank/Clearwire transaction, which makes probably the weakest mobile provider more of a real competitor. She also did some smart things with wireless spectrum, as well as proposing an end to blackout rules for NFL games.
That Sprint transaction is the bookend to former FCC Chair Julius Genachowski’s decision to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, and it’s hard to overstate the importance of either event to your wallet and mine. As part of the T-Mobile non-transaction, AT&T had to pay a breakup fee of $4 billion. T-Mobile took that money, hired an ass-kicking CEO, and put a rocket behind their rollout of LTE, the state-of-the-art high-speed mobile networking standard. They also purchased small carrier MetroPCS, with the aim of improving their network with Metro’s spectrum.
T-Mobile also introduced an “uncarrier” marketing strategy that’s far more fair and transparent than AT&T or Verizon’s offerings. Unlike the other carriers, at T-Mobile, it’s clear how much you’re paying for service, and how much you’re paying for a phone, because you buy the phone at full retail rather than at the “discount” the other carriers offer. This allows T-Mobile to have contract-free plans that can be cancelled at any time, rather than the usual two-year lock in from the other carriers. In the past quarter, T-Mobile added a million subscribers, the most of any provider, on the strength of this service, and they’re live with LTE in 254 cities.
Sprint has announced a new plan to roll out LTE, called “Spark”, but it’s not clear right now exactly how they’re going to change their plans to be more competitive. My guess is that they’ll need to match or beat what T-Mobile is offering.
There’s no way any of this would have happened in a Republican administration. Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, Bush’s FCC chairs, were deregulators, not regulators.