Intermodal competition is defined as: “provision of the same service by different technologies (i.e., a cable television company competing with a telephone company in the provision of video services).”

Intramodal competition is defined as: “competition among identical technologies in the provision of the same service (e.g., a cable television company competing with another cable television company in the offering of video services).”

Focus on 4 words: same, different, identical, same.  Same is repeated twice.

The Free State Foundation (FSF) is out with a paper regarding the existence of intermodal competition between wireless and wired.  The reason is that they take exception with the FCC’s recent reports on Wireless and Video competition.

Saying wireless represents intermodal competition to wired (fiber/coax) is like saying that books compete with magazines or radio competes with TV.  Sure, the former both deliver the printed word.  And the latter both pass for entertainment broadcast to us.  Right?

Yet these are fundamentally different applications and business models even if they may share common network layers and components, or in English, similarities exist between production and distribution and consumption.  But their business models are all different.

So are wireless and wired really the SAME?  For voice they certainly aren’t.  Wireless is still best efforts.  It has the advantage of being mobile and with us all the time, which is a value-added, while wired offers much, much better quality.  For data it’s the same thing.  With wireless I can only consume stuff in bite sizes (email, twitter, peruse content, etc..) because of throughput and device limitations (screen, processor, memory).  I certainly can’t multi-task and produce content the way I can on a PC linked to a high-speed broadband connection.  One thing I can do with the phone that I can’t do with the PC is take pictures.  So they really ARE different.  And when it comes to video, there is as much comparison between the two as a tractor trailer and a motorcycle.  Both will get us there, but really everything else is different.

By saying that intermodal competition exists between wireless and wired, FSF is selectively taking aspects of the production, distribution and consumption of content, information and communications and conjuring up similarities that exist, but are small pieces of the of the overall picture.  I can almost cobble together a solution that is similar vis a vis the other, but it is still NOT the SAME!  Which raises another issue, namely that product bundling and on-net pricing are huge issues that policymakers and academics have ignored with respect to promoting monopoly and limiting competition.  But in the process of both, consumers have been left with overpriced, over-stuffed, unwieldy and poorly performing solutions.

In the words of Blevin, FSF is once again providing a “vague, conflicting, and even incoherent definition of intermodal competition.”  10 years ago the US seriously jumped off the competitive bandwagon after believing in the nonsense that FSF continues to espouse.  As a result, bandwidth pricing in the middle and last mile disconnected from moore’s and metcalfe’s laws and is now overpriced 20-150x impeding generative ecosystems and overall economic growth.

The key was Steve Jobs’ demand to AT&T that smartphone applications purchased through the App Store have unfettered access to the internet, be it through:

• 2G, which was relatively pervasive, but slow at 50-300kbps,
• 3G, which was not pervasive, but faster at 500-1500 kbps, or
• Wifi (802.11g), which was pervasive in a lot of “fixed” areas like home, work or school.

The latter made a ton of sense sense, in particular, because data apps, unlike voice will more likely be used when one is relatively stationary, for obvious visual and coordination and safety reasons; the exception being music.  In 2007 802.11g Wifi was already 54 mbps, or 30-50x faster than 3G, even though the Wifi radios on smartphones could only handle 30 mbps.  It didn’t matter, since most apps rarely need more than 2 mbps to perform ok.  Unfortunately, below 2 mbps they provided a dismal experience and that’s why 3G had such a short shelf-life and the carriers immediately began to roll out 4G.

Had Jobs not gotten his way, I think the world would be a much different place as the platforms would not have been so generative and scaled so quickly.  This is an example of what I call Metcalfian “suck” of the application ecosystem for the carriers and nothing exemplified it better than the iPhone and App Store for the first few years as AT&T outpaced its rivals.

But few people to this day realize or appreciate that Steve Jobs revived equal access; something the carriers and federal government conspired to and successfully killed in the early 2000s.  Equal access was the horse that brought us competitive voice in the early 1980s, competitive data in the early 1990s and helped scale digital wireless networks nationwide in the late 1990s.  All the things we’re thankful for, yet have forgotten, or never entirely appreciated, how they came about.

Because of this “smart” or market driven form of equal access and in appreciation of Steve Jobs’ brilliance, I am going to introduce a new law.  “The Law of Wireless Gravity: a wireless bit will seek out fiber as quickly and cheaply as possible.”  I looked it up on google and it doesn’t exist.  So now I am introducing it into the public domain under creative commons.  Of course there will be plenty of metaphors about clouds and attraction and lightning to go along with the law.

I hope people abide by this law in all their thinking about and planning for broadband, fiber, gigabit networks, application ecosystems, devices, control layers, residential and commercial demand, etc…because it holds across all of those instances.  Oh, yeah, it might actually counter the confusion over and disinformation about spectrum scarcity at the same time.  And it might solve the digital divide problem, and the USF problem, and the bandwidth deficit….and even the budget deficit.  Ok, one step at a time.