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 …
Mobile broadband: A (still) under-appreciated economic miracle
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 …
Apollo, mankind, and Moore’s law
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, …
