When Better Broadband Might Not Help

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, in detailing the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on various sectors of the Wisconsin economy, recommends three priorities: 

• Get Everyone Back to Work

• Fix Broadband:

• Support Innovation

It is what one might expect, but also shows the difficulty of generating economic growth where it might not be happening organically. An isolated region heavily dependent on tourism might prefer to diversify, but there are good reasons why all sorts of firms and industries do not locate themselves in remote areas. 

A region with low population might similarly wish to spur economic growth by focusing on one or two new potential growth areas, but with no natural advantages in human resources, distribution networks or other underpinnings of an industry. 

That is not a criticism of a report by the WEDC, simply an observation that economic growth is not easy when low population, remote location, lack of skills or knowledge or other attributes that attract people and firms are lacking. 

Nor is it easy to suggest how the situation might be changed, by any set of feasible government policies other than reopening the economy.

There is a direct and measurable causal link between “going back to work” and worker income and tax revenue. The causal link between broadband and economic growth or innovation is much harder to demonstrate. 

In fact, there might be correlation without causation, in the same way that better broadband tends to exist where people are wealthier, live in higher-density areas, have higher education attainment and are younger. 

People generally believe there is such a causal relationship, but the reverse might generally be the case. Economic success leads to demand for better broadband. 

Virtually everyone “believes” (or at least acts as though they believed) that advanced technology (faster broadband, artificial intelligence, IoT, 5G) leads to an increase in productivity. People, organizations, firms and countries that have and use more of such assets are presumed to make faster productivity gains, and generate more economic growth.

The problem, aside from inability to measure precisely, seems to be that the evidence is suspect. It still does not appear that better, faster, more extensive broadband adoption actually is related to productivity gains.

source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Broadband and innovation are good things. It simply is not clear that better broadband leads to economic growth in any direct way.

How Much Business Value from Influencing 5G Standards?

Historically, there has been business value when a firm is able to influence the setting of technology standards in ways that play to the firm’s strengths. 

Some argue 3G, 4G and 5G provide examples.  With the exception of “market-driven” standards such as Windows or IoS, it is less clear to me that vendor influence actually delivers so much value in setting telecom standards. 

“Standard setting does not always create market power for the standardized technology,” say economists at NERA Economic Research. 

“The gains from formal standard setting can be defined as the difference between the royalty that the technology owner can charge after being selected formally as the standard and the royalty that she could charge if no formal standard were set,” they say. 

source: Statista

Some will point to quantitative measures to suggest Chinese firms have a clear lead in 5G patents. But more patents do not necessarily mean better patents, some will note. 

By some accounts, patent portfolios are rather more distributed than often appears.

source: GreyB

In settings where compatibility requirements are high, standards competition may be very important as the choice of a standard may virtually eliminate, not merely disadvantage, competing technologies. 

One hears it argued that Europe benefited from its “leadership” of 3G, while the United States benefited from its “leadership” in 4G. It is hard to parse such statements. One might note that European firms Ericsson and Nokia benefited hugely in the 3G era as suppliers of infrastructure. 

The same argument is heard about U.S. firms in the 4G era, but the argument is nuanced. Firms such as Qualcomm lead in chipsets, but no U.S. firms lead in radio infrastructure. To the extent there was “leadership,” it was in applications and service development, not infrastructure or necessarily “economic benefits.” 

Also, the growth of open source and virtualization tends to degrade any potential value standards influence might have, as, by definition, open source means buyers have choices beyond the usual cast of supplier characters.

One way of putting it is that what mattered was the economic benefit derived from 4G, not the “leadership” in standards or infrastructure supply, and that mostly because it was application developers, platforms and content suppliers that drove the value of what could be done with 4G, not the network infrastructure or connectivity supply. 

The same “value” often tends to be believed about patent portfolios, and there is evidence that the causal link is quite weak: patent portfolios do not often lead to market dominance. 

It is not the infrastructure; it is the value a nation or a firm can wring from it that matters.

Ultra-Low Latency Use Cases is Where Most New 5G Apps Will Develop

Though capacity matters, the big use case upside for 5G is expected to come in the area of ultra-low latency applications or perhaps ultra-reliable and ultra-low-latency use cases. If prior history proves a useful guide, many of the new use cases will develop only after five or more yeras. Many could  flourish only in the 6G era, even if essentially prototyped on 5G networks. 

source: Nokia

It takes time to envision and then retool entire business processes to take advantage of the new network’s performance attributes. And many additional parts of the ecosystem, such as edge computing, also must develop in tandem.

Public Policy is Devilishly Hard Stuff

Public policy success always is harder than you might think, if only because the causal relationships between a policy and an intended outcome are tough to confirm, and often because unintended consequences are common as well. At other times policy failures are hard to diagnose or predict. But policy failure rates arguably are fairly high, despite good intentions. 

An examination of a recent program to increase broadband internet access adoption and quality might provide an example. “we find no positive effect on home broadband adoption from programs funded by the Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (‘BTOP’),” say economists George Ford,  T. Randolph Beard and Michael Stern. 

BTOP, which added about $4.7 billion to ongoing efforts to supply access to the estimated six percent of U.S. households without terrestrial network access to internet access at a minimum of 25 Mbps, seems to have had no effect. 

“We find no effect of the BTOP programs on home broadband adoption,” the economists say. “The evaluation of BTOP and similar programs has been done before. As for BTOP generally, econometric analysis by Hauge and Prieger (2015) found that the effect of the BTOP “stimulus spending on broadband adoption may well be zero.”

Another study found the “program had no significant impact on broadband adoption rates.” 

That is not to say success, measured as service adoption, is impossible. Comcast’s program for low-income customers seems to have added as many as eight million households. Generally speaking, lower prices tend to spur higher buying rates for any desired product. The issue is that many “non-buyers” of internet access have reasons for not buying that are not strongly affected by price reductions.

“Though using an admittedly crude calculation, Rosston and Wallsten (2019) estimate the own-price elasticity of demand for broadband (for low-income households) to be only about 0.10 to 0.13. A 10 percent reduction in price only increases subscriptions by about one percent,” the authors say. Other studies suggest similar low price elasticity. 

“It does not appear that price is the primary reason for non-adoption,” they conclude. According to U.S. Census Department surveys, most people who do not buy internet access report they do so because they “do not need it.” Perhaps only half a percent of non-buyers say “price” is the reason they do not buy. 

source: Phoenix Center

One might well draw the conclusion that the drive to make such access available is fully consistent with our presumed general positions on equity: everyone should be able to avail themselves of internet access. That is perhaps an obviously different goal from “everybody uses the internet,” which is a choice individuals make. 

It is worth noting that individuals also vary in the means they use to satisfy that need. A significant percentage of consumers consciously choose to buy mobile access rather than fixed access, as their sole form of access. 

And some people, especially some older people, might never decide they “need” the internet. That is a generational issue that fixed itself with time. There was a time when many older people believed they did not need linear video services. Many more might believe they do not need streaming video, either. Those demand profiles change over time. 

The point is that public policy is a devilishly complicated endeavor. Even well-meaning policy goals may miss the mark. Ensuring that everyone has quality fixed network internet access seems a well-established and rational policy aim. 

We might still find that some people do not wish to avail themselves of such services, even when price is not a barrier, especially when substitutes (mobile access) are available.

Work from Home Forever?

A reasonable number of observers--maybe even most--seem comfortable with the notion that huge numbers of workers, kept home because of the Covid-19 pandemic, will “never” return to former work arrangements. Some of us are pretty sure the underlying trends in place before the pandemic will reassert themselves over a couple years, perhaps taking as long as five years to do so in all cases. 

source: eMarketer

To be sure, 44 percent of workers say they do not wish to work from home, ever. About 12 percent say they would rather do so essentially all the time. Another 18 percent would prefer to work from home three to four days a week (roughly half to 80 percent of the time). More than a quarter of all surveyed workers would prefer to work from home 20 percent to 40 percent of the time.

What remains unclear is what percentage of actual jobs, and what percentage of firms, actually believe that can be done with no downside.

Often No Difference Between Unlimited and Metered Usage Plans

Comcast, in reinstituting its monthly usage cap, which had been waived in response to the stay-at-home orders caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Where the usage cap had been set at 1 terabyte, now Xfinity internet metered plans have a limit of 1.2 terabytes. As often is the case, the practical difference between an “unlimited” usage plan and a plan with a high usage allowance is nonexistent. 

In other words, if typical monthly usage ranges between 250 gigabytes to 350 GB per month, a usage cap of 1.2 TB is effectively four to six times more than ever is required, so effectively “unlimited.”  

source: OpenVault

Many people argue that any pricing policy other than “unlimited” is somehow unfair. Perhaps this is an expectation created by the ways people come to experience use of the internet, with many free to use apps supported by advertising revenue models, with subsidized usage at schools and public Wi-Fi hotspots. 

Most products, though, are priced based on usage or volume: clothing, shoes, water, trash collection, groceries, gasoline and other fuels, electricity, airline tickets, dental services, data storage or compute cycles. 

Many refer to internet access as a “utility.” There often seems to be an unstated implication that internet access therefore should be free, low cost or unlimited in terms of use. But no other utilities are priced that way. They all are usage based, and for good reasons. Price is a tool for encouraging people not to waste expensive or carbon-impactful resources.

5G Economic Impact?

It is a no-brainer that 5G economic impact will be somewhat substantial over the next decade, if only because communications is a significant portion of global economic activity all the time. In 2018, for example, mobility by itself represented nearly five percent of global gross domestic product, by some estimates.

Other estimates often peg all communications spending at about  three percent of GDP to 3.5 percent of GDP.

source: Researchgate

Most economic assessments attempt to include the related economic benefits, in addition to the direct benefits. The multiplier might be in the range of $5 in benefit from every $1 in telecom spending. 

Still, direct impact is substantial. If global GDP is $142 trillion, then 3.5 percent in direct telecom spending is $5 trillion. Mobility is not all of telecom spending, but likely represents 65 percent or so. In that case, 5G might be included in the $3.25 trillion, mobility generates. But, of course, not all spending is on 5G. So reduce 5G share to perhaps half and 5G might represent $1.6 trillion in revenue.

It is nothing to dismiss, but is a far cry from the $7.5 trillion some estimate.