One advancement in technology can change everything. Likewise, a change in policy can turn everything topsy-turvy. Witness the Clinton administration’s decision last week to no longer purposely degrade GPS signals, which overnight had the end effect of making GPS devices more accurate. The adjustment has the potential to change how every wireless carrier deploys E911 service because an off-the-shelf, GPS-based solution suddenly meets federal requirements for delivering E911 position location services.
As much as businesses need to be flexible in light of potential policy and technology changes, governments must be able to adapt to those changes, too.
However, state and federal officials seem to be dragging their feet about passing laws to accommodate today’s rapidly changing environment.
Take universal service provisions. State regulatory agencies and the Federal Communications Commission are slow in giving wireless carriers access to universal-service funds, even though they don’t have a problem asking those same wireless carriers to pay into the fund to provide universal service.
Why? Because it’s a policy change that forces a change in mind-set.
Eligible telecommunications carriers in the past have been those wired companies willing to bring telecom service to the boondocks and regions where the economically deprived live. Government has decided it is only fair to compensate carriers willing to offer service in those regions where perhaps they wouldn’t make a profit by following conventional business plans.
It takes a change in one’s thinking to say that a wireless network can provide as essential a service as a wired network.
Wireless carriers like Western Wireless repeatedly have tried to gain ETC status to offer wireless solutions as an alternative to fixed service in a number of states, but by and large, their efforts have been fruitless.
In South Dakota, for example, state government required the wireless carrier to provide service statewide before it could be eligible for ETC funds. But Western Wireless can’t do that because its license doesn’t allow it to offer service across the entire state. Western has asked the FCC for help and is still waiting.
As technology changes come to the United States, the old rules don’t always make sense. Governments have to be nimble enough to evolve their rules to accommodate today’s new technology-enabled environment.
