Last week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai outlined his plan to auction a huge swath of wireless spectrum known as the C-band. It was a tricky dance because Pai had to find a compromise among satellite firms that currently (under)utilize the spectrum (to beam video and audio content to broadcasters and others) and would like to sell much of it, mobile carriers that would like to buy it for their 5G wireless build-outs, and various political factions who have their own ideas about how to manage the airwaves. 

It looks like Pai’s plan has attracted enough support to auction 280 megahertz (MHz) of spectrum by December 2020. The C-band is attractive because of both its size, which offers lots of capacity, and where it sits on the frequency map, which fills a key strategic role in new 5G network architectures. The additional 280 MHz could nearly double the total existing spectrum now deployed by all major mobile carriers. This particular auction is just one part of a much larger big-bang of spectrum availability.

New research continues to demonstrate that information technologies are even more economically powerful than official data suggest. Over the past five years, I’ve attempted to show that we have underestimated the price declines and performance improvements in smartphones. (See, for example, “The A12 chip: Estimating innovation with iPhone prices,” in which I estimated that it would have cost $28 million to purchase the basic building blocks of an iPhone XS in 1991.) Last summer, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) partially acknowledged this when it revised its historical price and output figures for mobile phones, cloud computing services, and internal software development.

The BEA’s revision was in part based on excellent work by the Federal Reserve’s David Byrne. Now Byrne and other economists are putting even more analytical meat on the bones. In the process, they are once again dramatically raising estimates of the economic impact of smartphones and internet services.

In newly updated work with Carol Corrado, for example, Byrne seeks to capture missing value from broadband connectivity and content flowing over these networks. His bottom line is that “the innovations boost consumer surplus by nearly $1,700 (2017 dollars) per connected user per year for the full period of this study (1987 to 2017) and contribute more than 1/2 percentage point to US real GDP [gross domestic product] growth during the last ten (2007 to 2017).”

When Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the moon 50 years ago this week, they had a large portion of the world’s computing power with them on Columbia and Eagle and behind them in Houston. One NASA engineer estimated that, between 1962 and 1967, the Apollo program had purchased 60 percent of all integrated circuits built in the US.

Today, however, that overwhelming proportion seems paltry in its aggregate power. The two Apollo Guidance Computers (AGC) onboard the spacecraft, for example, each contained 32 kilobits of random-access memory and 72 kilobytes of read-only memory. The AGCs had a primary clock running at 2.048 megahertz, and their 2,048 integrated circuits contained only several tens of thousands of transistors. They also weighed 70 pounds.

By comparison, today’s iPhone XS sports 32 gigabits of dynamic random-access memory, 256 gigabytes of storage, and a processor with 6.9 billion transistors running at 2.49 gigahertz. That’s a million times more memory, several million times more storage, and hundreds of millions times more processing power than the AGCs. All in a package one-hundredth the weight.