Mobile Data Roaming and Incentives for Investment in Rural Broadband Infrastructure

Mobile broadband Internet access is highly important to the American economy. The benefits of mobile broadband depend on investment in deploying and upgrading network infrastructure by broadband providers. Thus investment in mobile wireless infrastructure plays a vitally important role in sustaining the growth of the industry and the economy. There is a high opportunity cost from the forgone benefits when investment is discouraged. Each dollar not spent on investment destroys more than a dollar's worth of economic output and GDP, as well as lowering earnings and employment, due to the interconnected nature of the economy. Preserving incentives and lowering barriers to invest thus are paramount. Roaming arrangements among service providers allow a provider to offer service to its customers when they travel to areas where the provider holds no spectrum licenses. Current federal policy toward mobile data roaming, however, has the potential to discourage investment in infrastructure, and indeed appears to have done so. Today's rules grant ever more bargaining power and lower rates to the party requesting roaming from the carrier that actually deployed the infrastructure, constituting a form of access regulation that deters investment by allowing free-riding on others' networks. The analysis performed here indicates that the poor incentives created by liberal data roaming policy may have cost the economy an estimated $20 billion in output, $11 billion in GDP, $6 billion in earnings for workers, and 134,000 jobs. Under some alternative assumptions, these opportunity costs are even larger