 Welcome to Building Tomorrow, a show about the way tech and innovations are making us all better off. I'm your host, Paul Matzko, and we're talking today with Rosalind Layton about new 5G cellular technology and how it might change our lives over the next couple of years. Now, Rosalind's a visiting scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a visiting researcher at Alberg University, and a vice president with Strand Consult in Denmark. It's quite a list! Thanks for coming on today, Rosalind. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. You know, I just want to say I love the work you do at Cato, and you know, I appreciate all your listeners. I'm a techno-optimist, and I see, you know, our media gives us so much negative discussion about technology, and I see all the benefits, so I look forward to our conversation today. It's true. We're kind of the inverse of black mirror, right, rather than the worst case scenario. We try to imagine the optimistic use cases for this new technology here on Building Tomorrow. Why don't we start with the basics, Rosalind? Now I know my phone company keeps bragging about, you know, the how-there 4G service is better than the other guys' 3G service, and I get that larger numbers are bigger and better than smaller numbers, so 5 is bigger than 4, so 5G must be better than 4G. What is 5G? How does it work, and how is it better than what we currently have on our cell phones? 5G is the next iteration of the mobile standards. It talks a lot about speed, so, you know, between 10 to 100 times the speed of 4G today, so, you know, that's a lot about capacity. The other important thing is about the lack of latency, so, you know, even though you probably enjoy 4G, there's a lot of, some things maybe, you know, necessarily streaming a movie, you know, you don't even, you will get seamless capability. When you look at 5G, you have the ability to do remote surgery, so the quality, the speed, the lack of latency and the data coming through, that's really what 5G is about, and it's also about the use cases. I mean, we think a lot about our mobile phones and using the internet. 5G is really about the internet of things. It's about machines using the internet. It's about industrial applications, railways and coal mines and oil fields and every kind of, you know, the electric grid, smart cities, all of these smart homes and so on, smart cars. So different sort of, it's not just about individual users. It's about connecting machines. It's about bringing intelligence to the different activities that we do. And so that's, you know, that's why it's, maybe for some of us, might be hard to understand. We haven't experienced those things. It's not just about having a smartphone anymore. Yeah, it's more than just, okay, we're going to get incremental speed improvements to our cell phones. I mean, that's true, but in the way I've put it mentally with that combination of low latency and high bandwidth is to think of, is to think of how like the stream of information being both something that flows faster and the channel is deeper, right? Like latency and bandwidth, both of which improve the kind of information data sharing flow between servers and your phones or other connected devices, which is, you know, leads to, does lead to faster cell phone use. But I do like how you mentioned, it's about more than that, right? It's not just upgrading from the, you know, oh, my Apple 7 is a little bit faster, my Apple 6, my iPhone 6 and so on. Can I say one other thing too, it's also about more efficiency with the power consumption as well as the spectrum. One of the wonderful things that we have found with 5G was we've been able to recover parts of the radio spectrum. We never thought that could be used for mobile service. So for example, your listeners might have heard of the incentive auction. We took this low band spectrum that was used for television and recovered that and using previously parts of the radio spectrum, nobody thought could be useful for these things. And 5G is intelligent, so it can switch its capabilities depending upon the spectrum it's using, the service that's at hand. It's flexible and adjustable and smart. So if you have an application that can be done on a, it will adjust to be more efficient given the task at hand. Well that kind of flexibility seems very valuable, especially with I think some of the use cases you already teased in your response with like the Internet of Things or with driverless vehicles where you have the potential for, let's say you're on the highway and you're driving your smart car and you want it to communicate with every single car it passes. They're sharing data seamlessly in real time and they're uploading data to servers back at corporate headquarters for however the manufacturers are. You need that kind of flexibility because any gap in coverage has implications for how this technology functions for the reliability of it and etc. So I think that flexibility is quite fascinating especially given that it was, this is spectrum that if you'd had an auction for it years ago would have been relatively valueless. We're only now seeing the potential value in what was considered junk spectrum which is fascinating as well. That's actually quite interesting too. Maybe I should give our listeners a grounded example when we talk about speed gains. So again this isn't just about speed and we'll talk about some more applications here but as I was trying to think of it in illustration we're talking about exponential gains in capacity and bandwidth. So one illustration was a thousand time, potentially a thousand time faster download speed so an entire 4k high def film you could download on your phone in 10 seconds or the entire transformers franchise in under a minute though why you voluntarily subject yourself to cinematic torture I don't know but we're talking about not again not just incremental increases but exponential increases in the kind of capacity of a 5G wireless up. Rosalind can you walk us through so you mentioned a bunch of examples of where 5G, what kind of technologies 5G could make plausible or kind of useful for mass adoption could you maybe explore some of those a little more for our listeners. So one of the things I think we talked about was well what would retail be like let's say you know okay a consumer application you want to shop online and so let's say when you want to buy luxury goods you know cars or art so on frequently we want to feel the product in real life or test drive it or so on you know 5G would allow you to have kind of virtual reality augmented reality which are things where you'd have a kind of a what would look like a hologram of a person a real person inside of the screen you would you could hold up your device or your tablet or your smartphone to your living room which would be automatically repainted or reshuffled with the let's say the the kind of art you wanted to buy or furniture that you'd want to buy the ability of having that augmented with a with a with an avatar walking you through so that you know you need to have a lot of throughput and data to have that work and it needs to be seamless you know if there were so many gaps in the conversation it wouldn't work so that's one thing I like the example of the autonomous vehicles and by the way you don't need to drive I mean our leading cause of death in the US as drunk driving or car accidents it's terrible you know I mean people do like to drive but it's quite a dangerous endeavor all things you know if you look at the numbers but there's so many there's so much information around and being able to harness it put it together and also fuel efficiency other things that if you can imagine entire driving experience so that as as let's say the street lights you know that they automatically turn they turn off and on if the you know if something is there you know conserving energy you have energy embedded within you know using the different kinds of sensors within all sorts of surfaces the you know the ability for the you know the car to take into account the weather conditions safety conditions or the you know the traffic conditions and so on all of those things that you know when we of course our human brains are very smart but we can't you know what what you can't see that's around the corner that could be able to be incorporated into the you know into the experience to have a safer experience more efficient more speedy you know so the other thing to say is it's 5g won't be a sort of push button switch we're gonna evolve a lot of the 5g things will be start to be realized on 4g so a lot of these things we're starting to see parts of today we're enjoying especially in health care we're having a number of innovations there some of these some but where we'll see these shifts will be on the industrial scale so for example smart signaling for trains you know the ability to be able to you know over agriculture right you want to you want to be able to look if you had to survey you wanted to plant a field right and if you take a microscope on the soil there's all these nooks and crannies inside the soil and then immediately you could have precision agriculture which will adjust the planting or the irrigation or the fertilizing or everything to the sort of micro level down to the centimeter of what the conditions are at that particular place so that sort of ability to incorporate the information and deliver a service for what's exactly needed across huge miles and acres right that's the kind of thing you have to have a wireless network for that has long capability have to have the spectrum the intelligence the ability to process all of that in real time automatically connected with devices so that's a sort of higher order kind of processing that is just not about our telephone in our home computer I mean so we're really talking about the ability for industry to operate at a totally new level and that's a that's where it's not just about us and what we can do every day it's making our all of our interest industries more intelligent more efficient that is important when we talk about how what can be the jobs of the future because we'll be all these marginal efficiencies we'll squeeze out where today that you know just the same way micro transactions in the long tail and how we've been able to tell all of our systems have been able to find new sources of revenue or value because we now have the ability to measure at small places or in small increments micro finance that's kind of thing think about 5G doing that in our industry you know we can all always think about how do we improve American industry right that you know always say we ran out of oil we found new ways to find oil I mean keeping going all the time always finding more efficiency and so the spectrum example is great because we thought that the low band spectrum that was junk and nobody could use it well turns out over long distances that's super because you have a agricultural area or farm or what have oil field what whatnot that you can actually turn that into something value I am struck by a couple of things here first of all a lot some of the use cases that that I proposed like the you know Thomas vehicles and the like they're within our imagination it's technology that is being developed on a relatively small scale but that for mass adoption will require you know truly more capacity than we currently have but again it's within our imagination it's something that we can currently see prototypes of we can currently see you can drive your your Tesla on driver assist even right now but I like your industrial examples I was actually reminded I was at TechCrunch disrupt out in San Francisco a couple weeks ago and they had a startup on on the exhibition alley for livestock live stock tracking so every individual animal would be tracked and you could basically do fascinating things with herd management you can tell which areas of the paddock they're specifically in down to the inch so that you can maximize you can prevent over grazing more effectively you can do a better job of exercising them or not exercising them or where you put the feed to feed the whole herd all kinds of cool stuff that's capable but again that requires for large-scale adoption it just requires more bandwidth than we currently have another example that came to mind was I saw a patent filing by Walmart to create little fleets of thousands of robotic bees that would do micro targeted pollination you know we're having a crisis with with bee die-off which leads the problems with pollinating crops and rather than just spraying fields which is kind of the default right now and hoping some of that pollen drifts to where it needs to go you can be a lot more efficient and more cost-effective increased you know production per acre by in theory sending these fleets of bees but again that requires the kind of bandwidth that comes with 5g and that's not something that's currently currently possible for g technology let me say right and what's so exciting about that is that our major let's say that there will be like step function and improvements it could happen in a rural area so it's not like oh and select on valley we'll see this great 5g adoption in fact that may be the last place because in fact cities are some of the most difficult places to get this deployed you know you can go to a rural area where the you know the particular residents or that municipality says hey bring it on we want to you know you could find an across one railroad or one oil field or one farm they will quickly make an application and have a proof point so we could find you know Mississippi will be the leader or Indian app Indiana or whatever and so that's exciting democratization there that is that could I believe to bring some equalization between rural and urban areas at least in terms of new economic development so so that's what's also exciting we don't know exactly today you know where all the business models will be you know which industries will be first I mean we can talk about this industrial Internet of Things and see that the efficiencies are there definitely there are industries who want to get this deployed you know they're working with policymakers or they're you know trying to do you know drones and so on administration trying to work them but what's also exciting is that the established players we know today may not be the winners of the future I mean in fact you will have a kind of a shake up and what may emerge our companies we haven't heard of because doing it's not clear exactly who will build the better better mousetrap at today so but we're all watching these things as you talk about the livestock example or you know what we can see when you go to disrupt and these other conferences yeah little by little it's happening and it's incremental it's not as I said it's not a push button and overnight everything will be the world of 5g it will evolve it'll be like a flywheel right little but you'll be a snowball effect little by little we are doing pre 5g at least 25% of Americans have some kind of Alexa or Google home device that they use so that so already Americans have adopted extremely fast I mean even faster than they were adopting smartphones so people have really quickly integrated these they're experimenting and working with these things already Verizon actually sponsored a panel at TechCrunch trying basically promoting what they're we're trying to do with 5g in contrast AT&T and they made a quite a large claim and I'm actually a historian by training and so it was a historical claim and so I was intrigued by it but they said they think of 5g as the I think it was the fourth Industrial Revolution which seemed a bit grandiose to me but at the same time there is there are some interesting corollaries right where it like if you think of the combustion engine well when it's first developed there's not a lot of immediate use cases its first application is industrial applications doing stuff that formerly required water power but eventually it transformed it worked its way down to yeah okay we get the combustion engine as a driver of industrialization so I thought that was a it was an interesting claim I'm still somewhat skeptical but what do you think brazil do you see 5g is that having that kind of possibility well what I like I really like that those two companies have a bit of rivalry because they're such that in world of the telecom and tech policy people want to paint them out as a duopoly and they're actually extremely different companies they are as per night as night and day and they're pursuing very different strategies and I think for consumers and competition that's fantastic it's a great thing they have well now of course both of them have 5g strategies but they're they're playing in very different parts of the ecosystem the bets in different ways so for example you know Verizon it really wants to be first in the home broadband market you know they are they want to displace cable they want you to stop they want you to give up your cable company instead by the 5g home broadband product so that you'll get all your movies and broadband and everything through the air and they're using particular set of spectrum to do that AT&T has a different strategy you know where they're working with in many respects becoming content media company you know that they have purchased a number of well-known brands to deliver content so they are there they're in it they have a different view that way they also have the biggest public safety network so they're looking at this industrial application around public safety that's extremely interesting because if you think about the way that we fight fires today or the way that we address disasters we're so much more efficient today than we were five or ten years ago the ability so for example when I was in we had a hurricane in Florida where my family lives and I was in Denmark last year through the entire hurricane I kept in touch with my family through over through the internet and we had we were in touch on you know SMS and Facebook and phone and so on so that the ability now that we can when we have disasters that we can locate people we can rescue them the way that first responders can coordinate to address when when there's a there's an emergency we have just overnight have improved that and it's getting better all the time so there's a lot of enterprise uses that you might not really hear about every day in the press but they're going on and those a both AT&T and Verizon they are working in different ways it's very exciting to see and that's great because it's competition they are they're also you know have a lot of intellectual property they're supporting different kinds of patents different kinds of activities so you know they are a real driver in our economy just given the level that they invest and and then of course Brent and T mobile as well as well as Comcast I mean just for your listeners to understand one quarter of all the world's investment in broadband networks is going on in the United States today and we're just 4% of the world's population and all of this money or is into our economy by private companies trying to figure out you know how do we you know how do we deliver the internet to people what do we do what are the services so that is an important fertilizer for all the devices and services and applications all that other stuff that goes on because fundamentally we have companies who willing to make an investment in networks so 5G we're looking at $275 billion over the next four to five years that's a staggering amount of money is more than any other industries putting into American economy and and so and in many cases it's not even clear whether you know how quickly whether they will recoup all of that because as I said that money will that investment may turn into ways of revenue for other parties you know all the others so for example the Google's and Facebook's of the world or the device makers or the other services and yet companies we've never heard of today so that's an important part of the dynamism that that we that 5G will create we and that story is being written right now this actually I think leads us to something I was interested in asking you about which was so you have the two big dogs in rolling out 5G tech are AT&T and Verizon the third and fourth largest basically phone carriers right now are Sprint and T-Mobile but my understanding is they're relatively distant third and fourth there has been some brew ha ha over a proposed merger between Sprint and T-Mobile an attempt to kind of catch up with AT&T and Verizon how does that play into this 5G story right so and by the way you know there's also cable companies you know so Comcast Charter these companies have very large footprints across the United States they've already have wires in the ground and Wi-Fi networks so they're interested to play in this place too so it's it's not exactly correct to talk about the traditional mobile wireless carriers you have also fixed wireless solutions that are you know companies that are not household names they want to play in there so we actually have a couple of dozen of editors in fact but the instance for Sprint and T-Mobile this is really a question of synergies and a level of investment so you know Sprint and Sprint has a lot of spectrum T-Mobile has a lot of customers they have a prowess in marketing you know they're really good at in marketing and winning customers and they want to be able to combine their assets together and you know basically when market share take away market share from AT&T and mobile Comcast they want to play in the home broadband market as well they've been very successful to do that T-Mobile at least so the process of consolidation is a is a natural process it's always going has been going on and will continue you know that the AT&T today is is not the or the Verizon of today is not the companies that they were 10 years ago they all formed out of the breakup of AT&T and all these sort of like new companies spawned out of it the baby yeah so the baby bells broken up and reformed in new ways and so on grow and different things different you know so it's a constantly evolving and changing but in the case of the Sprint and T-Mobile this is if you just look at the mobile wireless market is that the you know the capability we have with just consumer mobile service you know we have increased by I don't know thousands of percent of improvement in the quality of mobile phones and we brought down the price like 99 percent so there's been tremendous efficiency in getting more capacity and low and you know meanwhile all the time that we're increasing the capacity on the mobile phone the price has fallen so all of these companies have in fact declining ARPU which is average revenue per user so you get you get all over time increasing value at a lower unit cost and you know so now the opportunity is what's the next stepwise function can I get more ever more data into my package can I do ever more things so you know the other so Sprint and T-Mobile just want to you know go up the value chain if you will they want to be able to you know take market share away from other players I mean that's a you know that's something that we should encourage so that's what's going on I do get the impression that in a sense what's happening is that the provision of raw internet of you know access the internet is being commoditized and so the margins you know margins on commodities are much tighter than margins on you know other kinds of consumer services and goods so as you say when you're trying to go up the value chain it's well you can get a healthier margin when you're selling you know streaming services like Netflix or you know some other kind of company but in a sense in the 5g world in the competitive 5g world there's not nearly as much relative value in providing that service I'm sure there will be for the the first one to get there yes absolutely so the value of your consumer broadband if you're any one of those companies will be maybe become smaller so you really want to figure out what kind of enterprise or industrial use can I do and that's why all these companies are making different bits in different enterprise sectors so and they're buying content because they you know they don't want to be in the world of you know for a long time our regular regulation has tried to make them into dump pipes you know just these kind of giant pipes delivering indiscriminately kind of data but the services that we want to use actually need very sophisticated they have sophisticated needs they you know have a certain kind of treatment if you will they need to have in order to work some has to be prioritized in a certain way so and again you don't want to wait 10 years to do that you want to be able to use start delivering today in an intelligent way ever better service so we have software defined networking we have a number of ways to make the existing network to have more efficient through software improvements through better management and so on and then also so part of that idea of selling the content or adding value added services helps the companies get revenue in the short run to define those long-term improvements now I think you've led us in a in a useful direction and it raises questions when we talk about the internet as a series of you know dumb pipes of internet service providers as providing pipes like a utility company would your water pipes or sewer pipes this leads us to a conversation over net neutrality which is still very much a live matter with the FCC you know changing its approach basically repealing some title to net neutrality rules recently to the anger of a lot of activists in the open internet activists how does the 5g conversation affect that net neutrality debate right I mean what does that look like a couple years in the future well so I mean I can tell you today I mean by definition 5g is intelligent network it is the antithesis of what net neutrality means if all data being treated the same I mean that is a totally um from an engineering perspective a dumb concept it's a stupid concept I mean I like to bring it to the point of view of you know personal freedom and personal choice you know in a net neutrality world I have to provision I'm required by the FCC to buy an internet connection which is enabled for content for which I don't support I don't agree with either politically or for my moral reasons I have to you know it might not even purchase it but I have to have you know I'm essentially paying for a capacity that I don't need and in a in a non-neutral world in a world of internet freedom I'm actually going to support the sort of content and services and data I personally believe in that I think are socially valuable not what's privately valuable I know that you know many people enjoy the films of Netflix that's fine but it doesn't mean I have to provision them you know I may enjoy other kinds of content but you know in a free world we should we shouldn't have to be coerced to support information that we don't personally agree with we should be able to support information that we that we agree that we find socially valuable so you know one of the things I've always advocated for is you know a set of the internet which is essentially socially valuable services which are provided for free and you don't need a lot of data to do things like bus schedules or education basic education materials some kinds of you know health care videos and things like that and those kind of things have are not allowed in the net neutral world we can and these models are used in developing countries so things like you want to check that your AIDS medication is not counterfeit or that you want to you know you have a woman suffering from some from a terrible disease wants to watch a video on some kind of information to to recover or how to take care of a child or whatever those kind of things are socially valuable which should be provisioned for free either by the provider itself philanthropy the government what have you and they don't take up that much data so I actually in a in a kind of world where there's flexible pricing for data we can allow for some things that everybody could access for free and then the part of the internet that's privately valuable the entertainment that part can be priced and that is up to the supply and demand and the free market and what have you so this notion that all data is the same is fundamentally against the idea of a world where we have free thinking people because we don't value all things the same and there are other cases where we can make to say well you know it's it's socially valuable that certain kind of information you could be able at any time to go on the internet and access it just fine fair enough whatever the case may be but you know what you want to see whatever someone's favorite video game or movie you know and you want in a certain quality you know then that will have a slightly higher price or whatever so we'd actually have a lot more internet for everyone if we allowed flexible pricing and and so this to me is this is one of the areas where this particular policy is so fundamentally unfair and cruel to the poor people to being a socially minded policy where everybody would benefit you would actually allow flexible pricing just to give you another example you know I live most of the year in Denmark and sometimes I have to testify in a regulatory hearing in another country I can go on Skype or whatever and do my testimony rather than getting on a plane I'm willing to pay a little bit more for that you know experience because I don't have to go on the plane I'd like to guarantee the quality and so on today I'm not you know I'm in a net neutrality world I'm not allowed to do that there's a lot of yeah so as we were saying right we wanted to have this you know we would like to have for just this conversation a quality guarantee that our connection would work and we can't buy that today that's right yeah and it reminds me of I was just reading article by Tim Wu who's the uh I think he's at Columbia if I remember correctly Columbia law professor who coined the term net neutrality and is one is a open internet activist um he called for a nationalized 5g network and so it's clearly a very different vision of what this future internet looks like um I mean I think the both parties over this debate want the same thing which is a competitive internet marketplace where you know internet providers compete with each other they have very different visions of how to arrive there um so no thanks for digging into that I I would like to move now I think to talking about a recent FCC decision uh that might not be immediately obvious to our listeners what it means for 5g and that was the FCC deciding to cap uh poll costs for putting up these 5g antennas and they capped the the dollar at the cost of that to 270 dollars that's all municipalities are allowed to charge for them what is the significance of that ruling what's going on there I I don't know if our listeners are going to naturally understand what that ruling means well I'm glad you brought that up and I just want to say that this this effort it was a an order voted on by the FCC on the 26th of September around streamlining and fast-tracking the roll out roll out of 5g it is a it's in the in the idea of telecommunications policy it's something we've been doing for 100 years so we have always had a a notion that there's value to communications there's a value to having all americans having access to communications and that it's part of the reason that the FCC was set up I mean not that it's perfect today was to ensure an agency that could make that could enforce the national policy so you know of course I don't you know I imagine our listeners would be bristling with the notion of a price control but there are demonstrated problems I can tell you for example you know in Denmark we had a case where 19 cities created a price cartel so that the rental price was four times the market rate so unfortunately a lot of local actors they can band together and create these cartels that will restrict or inhibit the ability to to deploy networks and the laws that the FCC has invoked are extremely clear because we have laws in the books for more than 20 years that localities municipalities they're not allowed to create undue burdens to companies who want to establish communications networks and so you know whether it's undue delays to get the permits to build or it's an ex exorbitant price and so on that's something that the FCC can what we call preempt to to put a perspective already at least 20 states have agreed in their red and blue states they've said look we want networks we want to streamline we don't want to reinvent the wheel we know that there's a lot of best practices that you know we can create a model code so most of the states have already gone ahead and have agreed to you know streamline this so that and the idea of course is we want the maximum number of providers to deploy right so for example there's a policy called one touch make city that if you're going to have a street pole that when you get that ready that it it you can get five five providers on that street pole it's not just the one it's the same idea as a dig once policy if you're going to dig a trench and put down a conduit you know like ollie make sure that everybody can use that trench you know don't you don't want to come back in a year and then say dig it up again because that's really costly so these are a lot of common sense ideas this is unfortunately to you know we had at the beginning like 2025 states already went ahead and said we're adopting the model code we want to be fit we want to get moving you know china is moving 12 times as fast as we are to get network deployed we got to step up the pace and what we have now is a lot of cases where we have holdouts where you have cities that have chronically mismanaged the resources they're in deep debt and they look at this opportunity as a way to earn revenue so they'll say hey five thousand dollars for every street pole i mean it just doesn't scale if you want to have these networks and rural areas you want them across the u.s you have to be able to have a a reasonable rational approach to the pricing and the other point is these are not natural markets in the sense that you know there's not a natural market for the street pole it's a monopoly it's owned by the city they you know and there's they're essentially the owner they don't have there's not competing providers of street poles so this is this is again and i'm a free market person this is the case where regulation is is is necessary because you have to and put the you have to provide the information and you also have to protect from abuse i mean i suppose i should say i have a certain degree of built in caution or skepticism some of that's the you know the concern i it makes perfect sense that national regulations are cleaner and neater and more convenient of for infrastructure development at least with a relatively light touch FCC that we currently have but it does raise concerns to me about overriding localism i mean there's like a federalist kind of question here yeah so let me say this i mean this is a case where you have to be careful because one area as a nation where we have looked at federal the need for federalism is communication policy these are laws that are very clear from our telecommunications act in 1996 and um you know if you don't like those laws well we can update that i would offer updating that act but that has not been something that um you know republicans have been trying to do that now for five years and have not had any cooperation but we really need to update that communications act but for the moment that's what we have that's what the american people we agreed to in congress it's been extremely successful to give us the other generations of mobile wireless that we enjoy and and so the FCC is just applying that to this next generation and you know they have been extremely careful to stay within the boundaries i mean that was the big critique about the prior FCC they kept pushing and exceeding the boundaries of their authority and this FCC is very clear to be within the boundaries to interpret the statute as it's written you know don't overinterpret it um so but what i'd say is communications policy is one area where as a nation over the last century we said there's a value to having everybody having a telephone or everybody having access to the internet or what have you so so this is just that in that vein and especially when everybody says they want more competition you're not going to get more competition unless you allow the provider to come into your community whether it's by wire or wireless or satellite or whatever you you have to let the network be built otherwise you're not going to get more competition it reminds me that we're not operating from a uh a state of nature here that we have this whole set of of institutions and and systems that uh that constrain the kind of ideal telecommunications system that we want so you know for example well we have this network of municipal utility monopolies right there's phone polls all over the country now in an ideal world that wouldn't have been we might not have constructed our energy and water and sewer grids in that way but that's what we did and so yeah we're confronted with that we're not dealing with a with kind of a free market for our energy grid and whatnot right so we have to deal with this already kind of distorted system the best we can so you know we can't let the best be the enemy of the better i suppose here right now i think and by the way the spectrum as well i mean as i said we have more that we're one of the most important things has been try to recover more spectrum and getting other kinds of providers to buy spectrum that's also really important that you know it's the supply that we get more supply in the marketplace and we can argue that the history the the history around spectrum was constrained that limited the number of players the same way with franchises i mean if you were a table company in order to get permission you had you made a deal with the local provider you had to provide coverage to everyone and now people forget that those deals were made and that was what the community agreed and now they don't like that anymore because then they'll say oh well we'll take public money and compete we're always you know there's always been past decisions that have consequences for the future and that's um you know that's one of the that's one of the challenges that we work with but technology is amazing because now we're finding out hey we can overcome the past monopoly or legacy with the new technology we just override it we find out a new way to do it that's a that's a good lesson i think for us to end on thank you rosalyn so much for coming on i appreciate your time and for our listeners until next week be well building tomorrow is produced by test terrible if you enjoy our show please rate review and subscribe to us on itunes or wherever you get your podcasts to learn about building tomorrow or to discover other great podcasts visit us on the web at libertarianism.org