Does Competition Between Cable and Fiber Increase Adoption?

Does Competition Between Cable and Fiber Increase Adoption?

U.S. broadband policy has long emphasized the importance of facilities-based competition—competition among providers who use their own infrastructure rather than leasing others’—due to its potential to encourage investment, improve quality, and lower prices. Today, focus has shifted to considering ways of getting the last unconnected people online. It is natural to wonder if, among its benefits, facilities-based competition could encourage adoption. The answer is not obvious. On one hand, more competition nearly always brings benefits of some sort, and additional varieties of offers to encourage the unconnected to subscribe might be among them. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that competition will focus on acquiring subscribers who have the weakest demand for broadband, and therefore may have little effect on adoption.
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Scott Wallsten is President and Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and also a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy. He is an economist with expertise in industrial organization and public policy, and his research focuses on competition, regulation, telecommunications, the economics of digitization, and technology policy. He was the economics director for the FCC's National Broadband Plan and has been a lecturer in Stanford University’s public policy program, director of communications policy studies and senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a senior fellow at the AEI – Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an economist at The World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.

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