Wholesale Wireless Hearing Analysis: A fiendish question

By Timothy Denton

SOMETIMES A QUESTION can send you back to first principles. Last Wednesday I heard one, and it kept me awake while I pondered it.The question was asked by a commissioner at the mobile wholesale hearing. It went like this: "The mobile sector has seen the most wonderful progress in the last 20 years. The landline side is in relative decline. Yet you say we should apply more of the approach we adopted for ensuring landline competition worked for mobile. Can you explain why? Is that not a contradiction?"The question is fiendishly difficult to answer, because it embedded a false premise,...