 Welcome back to another 5 minutes with Harold Feld where once again we're going to take topics that are insanely complicated mind-numbingly boring and try to make them slightly less boring because this stuff is important. So last time I talked about what we could do to make broadband more affordable. And I mentioned that we need to attack the root problem which is competition. How do we get more competition into broadband, the kind of competition where we're saying to these guys, pander to me, pander for my love. Give me the low prices and high quality that I want. Not that crap stuff that you're giving me right now, no you're going to give me the good stuff if you want my business. How do we get there? It's tough because as we used to say, this is a natural monopoly. There's huge cost to setting up these networks. In the case of mobile wireless networks, a lot of times because we're giving exclusive licenses, we've got a limited number that we can get out that sets a limit on competition. So here's the problem, nature is bringing this together as a duopoly or maybe three or four firms if we're really lucky. And we're trying to pry that apart and say, no nature, no, we want lots of competition. So how do we do that? How do we beat natural monopoly at its own nature game? Well, on spectrum, on wireless stuff, we have a couple of options. First is what we call unlicensed spectrum. You guys probably know it as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but lots of stuff runs over that. That's the idea that we can have lots and lots of devices operating on the same frequencies without interfering with each other. We're getting a lot better at that when we used to be. When we started doing this back in 1989, we just had cordless phones and TV remotes. Now we're moving it so that we can actually bring you broadband, broadband of a quality that can compete with some of the other broadband that's out there, give you some of the mobile services, freeing up more of that stuff will do a lot to increase competition. So that's one. Two, when we have our spectrum options, we can also make sure that some of these license end up in the hands of competitors to make competition stronger. Three, we make sure that whether you're wireless or you're a cable system or another wire line system, you can actually connect to the networks. This is critically important. We call this interconnection. Without interconnection, you can't actually have competitors come into the market because if you're a big guy like AT&T or Verizon or Comcast, you're like, ho, ho, ho, why should I let you interconnect with me and get to my customer's little provider? The answer is we require it. That's how we do it and we've been doing that for a very long time, very successfully. Next is something called special access. I'm not going to try to explain special access. I'm just going to tell you, click on the link below to see the video that I last made about special access. Short version, it's a way to give everybody access to the biggest choke points in the network so that all of this infrastructure that's lying out there right now, all of the competitors can access it. Now it doesn't give people a freebie. You pay for it, but the trick is you pay an actual honest rate for it rather than an inflated monopoly rate for it. So the FCC is looking at all of these things as ways to try to stimulate more competition. And if we can do that, if we can bring more competition to the market, we will make this stuff affordable in the best way possible, affordable for everybody. Remember, if you have any questions about telecommunications policy or just any questions, remember to use the Ask Feld hashtag, whether you're a troll because we love our trolls, or whether you're just some average person who wants to know what's going on, just remember Ask Feld.