NextGenWeb recently interviewed Dr. William Lehr, an economist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We discussed the federal government’s mandate to produce a national broadband strategy next year and also broached the issue of Net neutrality. Dr. Lehr shared his views on the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and also the effects additional regulations would have on economic growth, investment and a provider’s ability to appropriately manage their networks. We discussed this and more with Dr. Lehr – you can listen to this podcast by clicking here.

Also today Dr. Lehr released a study commissioned by Broadband for America entitled “Mobile Broadband and Implications for Broadband Competition and Adoption” which concludes that the impact of mobile broadband is pro-competitive.

Key conclusions of the study include:

• Mobile services in the U.S. are currently “robustly competitive.”
• “The overall impact of mobile broadband will be strongly pro-competitive.”
• Mobile and fixed broadband services to remain “distinct and complementary services, rather than as close service substitutes in most user/usage contexts.”
• By “enabling the convergence of mobile communication services and the broadband Internet, mobile broadband can enable the creation of markets for wholly new services (e.g., mobile health, location-aware multimedia, and machine-to-machine communications), as well as enhancing the value of existing broadband services by allowing them to go mobile.”
• “The rapid pace of progress in broadband-related investment in infrastructure, services, content, and applications; and innovation all along the value chain (from services to content to applications to end-user devices) should give us pause before we consider new regulatory obligations on broadband providers.”

You can view the entire study below.

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