At beginning of September 2009, CTIA submitted a filing to the FCC that compared the United States wireless industry with the UK wireless industry. The CTIA’s ex-parte filing to the FCC was likely a response to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) that stated the highest prices for mobile calls were found in Canada, Spain and the United States, with the lowest found in Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden.

According to the CTIA the report was built on flawed assumptions and that U.S. consumers enjoy the lowest per-minute rates of all the OECD countries.

CTIA is under pressure to defend the competitive practices in the wireless industry after the FCC launched an inquiry into the state of the industry that includes an examination of handset exclusivity deals.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the US cellular industry was often ridiculed by foreign technology companies as being a chaotic marketplace because of the plethora of technologies and the massive amount of carrier competition. I lost track of the number of times foreign vendors would complain about the number of wireless technologies; often stating that sticking to one technology would be best for the vendors (and supposedly the consumers). The one wireless technology that many foreign vendors had advocated was GSM; which made sense since their entire manufacturing complex was already in position to supply GSM. Their arguments did not support competition but rather supported a dictated technology environment. If not for the CDMA crowd, there would not have been the mad dash to improve and enhance GSM.

Thanks to the intense US competitive environment, GSM evolved to UMTS and now to LTE.

Policy makers need to focus on who exactly is promoting which technology initiative before they start screaming

I don’t believe that dictating technology initiatives encourages competition but hampers it by stifling innovation. By comparison, the US marketplace is intensely competitive. The industry is currently undergoing consolidation but that is being driven by the investment community and not the carriers per se. If the last 20 years can be used as an example, then we shall see the entire industry undergo fragmentation (once again) within a couple of years.

Low cell phone call pricing does not necessarily equate to an intense competitive environment but it can equate to a highly regulated environment. The higher prices probably have more to do with the high cost of technology and the need for the investment community to see a return on investment – all signs of a competitive environment. When cell phone pricing drops in a competitive environment, it drops fast.

When your country’s government advocates a single technology it is easy to maintain low pricing and to control the marketplace because everything is regulated. What a national government needs to do is encourage a technology dialogue and encourage multiple development paths.