Thank you all so much for the opportunity to speak to you today. Despite signing up for another job in Washington, DC, there’s truly no place like home, and I’m honored to be with you here in Colorado.
And while I will always be a loyal CSU Ram, CU is where I spent my law school years, honed my interest in politics, and committed to making a difference in the world. My bond with CU is literally unbreakable—to the tune of a once multi-hundred-thousand-dollar contract they never let me forget. If you look at my composite photo just down the hall, I clearly didn’t use the proceeds of my student loan on a decent haircut.
During my time here, around 25 years ago, Silicon Flatirons was launched. Since then, it has grown into a nationally recognized program for students and scholars interested in the intersection of law, policy, technology, and entrepreneurship. And this flagship conference is known far and wide as the “Davos of Telecom” – a gathering where leading figures in telecommunications raise and debate some of the most critical issues around technology policy and the law. But Davos doesn’t have “The Sink.”
I’m pleased to join you here today in my new capacity as President and CEO of NCTA – The Internet & Television Association. Our member companies connect more than 82 million customers around the country to high-speed internet and produce programming and entertainment options for millions more. From Wi-Fi 7 deployments to 100% fiber builds and from the Olympics to theme parks, our operators and programmers are at the cutting-edge of connectivity and entertainment. Connecting homes with each other and hearts with emotion across the country.
More plainly: Our members and their customer consumers are very much the “haves” today in the story of “haves” and “have-nots.” They are the “haves” because we provide our customers with content and accessible, speedy, reliable, and affordable broadband options in places as remote as Alaska and as wired as downtown Manhattan.
Much like Silicon Flatirons, the cable industry has evolved considerably over the years, being itself built from nothing by the “have-nots.”
When television broadcast towers in the 1940s failed to reach residents in rural mountainous areas of places like Arkansas, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, innovative residents got to work running cables from receivers down to their homes so they too could enjoy the same programming as their less remote neighbors. In fact, just down the road at the Cable Center, you can hold a hand forged amplifier made out of a Folger’s Coffee tin – ingenuity matching innovation at a time when both were required from those early pioneers. Pioneers who didn’t see themselves so much through the lens of haves and have-nots, but instead through the lens of can and will do. They adopted the original crypto vernacular, GMI. And with that optimism that they, too, could be among the “haves,” an entire industry was born.
Cable spread rapidly all over the country and Colorado grew to be its unofficial capital, its mayor our very own “Cable Cowboy,” John Malone. And just as quickly as it sprung up, regulators at the federal, state, and local levels rushed to decide how to wrangle these cable cowboys, those efforts resulting in a haphazard patchwork of laws and regulations that simultaneously misunderstood and thwarted the advancement of this new technology.
For example, when cable companies started producing large volumes of their own programming in the 1970s, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) struggled to categorize them, whether as broadcasters in unfamiliar clothing or as something entirely new. And state and local governments imposed significant hurdles to the deployment of the systems, hoping to extract as much as possible from a quickly growing industry.
As is so often the case, the private sector’s innovations vastly outpaced the slow crawl of the regulatory pen.
Another Coloradan, former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth, stepped in with a then controversial idea: Overregulating cable in its relative infancy would kill it. Rather than pile up ever-more cumbersome and confusing cable rules around the country, then-Congressman Wirth, who represented Boulder in the U.S. House, introduced, and got Congress to pass, the landmark Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 to reduce regulatory burdens and clarify how cable should grow in communities throughout the nation.
As Wirth said at the time the bill passed the House: “America stands on the threshold of an information revolution which promises to enrich and enhance the life of every citizen.” No one at the time could have predicted how much more revolutionary the rise of the internet would be over a decade later, but Wirth’s goal of “enriching and enhancing the life of every citizen” through an information revolution remains a noble one. And this march of progress was due in large part to the pioneers of our industry who stopped at nothing to bring connectivity to more Americans.
We do not need to travel decades back into the FCC’s public docket nor the congressional record to see how market advancements and policy conundrums continue to shape our ongoing “Information Revolution” in the 21st century.
Recent work in Congress continues to echo Wirth’s aims and the aims of the cable pioneers in the country hollers: How do we turn more who “have not” into those that “have”?
This fundamental question underpins modern communications and technology policy. How do we serve the unserved? How do we ensure more of our neighbors, our families, and our friends are equal participants and beneficiaries in the Information Revolution?
Congress tried to tackle this problem by passing the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, which allocated more than $40 billion for broadband expansion around the country. Unfortunately, as the program rolled out, there was less focus on the “have-nots” and too much focus on serving those who already benefited from excellent internet service. Meanwhile, regulators were painfully slow at greenlighting state plans.
Universal service remains an important goal, but it requires federal dollars to flow to areas where they have not. Overbuilding is a threat to improved private infrastructure, not a cause to be celebrated. I know about hard-to-reach communities—I’m from Yuma (Colorado, not Arizona), about a 2.5-hour drive east of here. You may know it as the thriving metropolis that lies in what some lovingly refer to as the Kansas/Nebraska part of Colorado.
When hard-won broadband dollars double or triple over existing service territory, communities like Yuma, Kit Carson, and Norwood either go without or their own small internet companies must compete against federally funded overbuilders. This deepens the divide between rural and urban corridors, between rich and poor, and between those who can communicate seamlessly and those who cannot.
The current Administration has worked to reduce some of this waste without scrapping the program entirely. I’m glad to see plans to connect more of the unconnected. Where there is no business case for privately-funded infrastructure, the government has an important role to play. And I agree there are areas where additional non-deployment resources would be helpful, such as digital literacy campaigns, telecommunications-specific workforce development programs, pole replacement funds, and more.
But we also need to recognize the role of private capital in building out the best communications networks the world has ever seen. Well before the advent of the BEAD program, companies in this sector put in the work to connect communities far and wide around the country. They kept the entire country and economy online during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic because of these future-focused investments. There are still gaps to fill, and there is always more work to be done, but private sector investment allowed the digital transition.
Operators alone have invested more than $340 billion in infrastructure over the last 20 years—that number is larger than the entire GDPs of countries like Portugal or Finland. And $25.1 billion of that total was invested in 2024 alone.
The industry’s more than 1 million employees have installed over 800,000 miles of fiber within our networks nationwide—that’s approximately 32 complete trips around the globe.
Our programmers are delivering unprecedented levels of valuable content, investing more than $528 billion into award-winning TV shows over the last 20 years. They employ more than 350,000 workers in rewarding positions around the country. If you have streamed “The Walking Dead,” you’ll know how I felt every time I showed up for finals.
These investments have yielded significant consumer benefits. A Morning Consult poll showed that 89% of consumers now give their broadband service a positive rating, far more than Congress can say. According to the FCC, approximately 91% of American homes and businesses have access to gigabit-speed service. And perhaps most importantly: Consumers are benefitting from a 98% reduction in cost per megabit since the year 2000. Juxtapose this to the cost of energy per kilowatt hour, which has actually increased by about 10.5% since the year 2000.
Think about these truly astonishing achievements. The “Information Revolution” Senator Wirth imagined in the 1980s has accelerated at a pace no one could have imagined, thanks to technologies that did not even exist at its start. So, before we can tackle problem-solving for the “have-nots” in today’s era, we must stop and take stock of what it is we already have.
All of the investments I’ve mentioned are super-charging internet speeds—Ookla notes that speeds have increased more than 9 times since 2010, growing roughly 30% every year for over a decade. Meanwhile, prices continue to decline as speeds increase. The average American family now pays about $75 per month for at-home internet, which is about half the price of the average family cell phone bill.
In 2025, consumers saved around $5 billion thanks to many who chose to bundle their home internet and mobile plans—as much as $1,000 per year back into families’ pockets. High-speed internet options for low-income families are offered as cheaply as $15 per month.
As a result of these innovative new options, the Big Three wireless carriers are no longer the only game in town when it comes to mobile service. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon watched 40% of all new wireless subscribers in Q3 2025 choose cable companies as their mobile providers. This shift has resulted in cable collectively growing into the 4th largest mobile carrier in the United States. That competition is keeping more dollars in consumers’ pockets.
And it isn’t just consumers leaping for more cost-effective and tailored connectivity options. We are building out private 5G networks around the country, leveraging access to the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum band. From manufacturers like John Deere and BMW to major transportation hubs like the Miami-Dade International Airport, CBRS deployments are helping enterprises function better and deliver higher-quality goods and services to the public. And it’s not just companies either. CBRS deployments are bringing connectivity to tribal communities like the Tohono near Tucson, Arizona—across the country, we are leveraging policy innovations like CBRS to turn the “have nots” into “haves.”
All of this is happening just as promising new innovations are coming into view on the horizon. The advent of artificial intelligence solutions for our networks is providing operators with significantly more insight into managing traffic flows, improving security, and locating faults and threats to infrastructure. Cable is no stranger to vandalism and line cuts from misguided copper thieves who cannot distinguish the precious metal from a coaxial cable or fiber-optic link. AI and other developments help providers pinpoint damage, re-route traffic, and quickly repair network facilities.
But even as we improve existing networks, we are doing more to bring connectivity to today’s have-nots. The industry is preparing for a new wave of Wi-Fi expansion by leveraging our access to the 6GHz band, as well as the adjacent 7GHz band. Now, I have to be careful when discussing this work with my kids given the 6-7 craze. But in all seriousness, the 7GHz band would allow for significantly higher bandwidth applications and offers virtually limitless potential for Wi-Fi growth.
Our industry will continue to prioritize affordability, permissionless innovation, and widespread deployment to maximize the number of those who “have” in this country.
But all of this investment, advancement, and optimism is not necessarily shared outside of our borders. No discussion of “haves” and “have-nots” would be complete without talking about the position of some of our global competitors in an era of increasing global connectivity.
Thanks to their anti-democratic government, criminalization of free speech, and bid to control all aspects of the telecommunications stack, China has clearly positioned its citizens to be among the “have-nots.” Even more concerningly, China is aggressively moving on the world stage to drag others backwards.
A clear example of this is China’s attempt to undermine the U.S. position on reserving the entire 6GHz band for unlicensed use. China’s state-owned telecommunications equipment maker, Huawei, is eager to disrupt the West’s movement toward permissionless innovation in this band and replace it with top-down licensed control. Our allies in Latin America and Europe will have to contend with this attempt to grow China’s global collection of “have-nots” at the next World Radio Conference in Shanghai next year. And we’ll be at their side in that fight.
These are not partisan issues. The global question around “haves” and “have nots” is a real challenge, and China is angling to grow its own version of the internet and connectivity—that asymmetry is one worth fighting.
Even here at home, we have many more homes to connect, many more rural and low-income families to welcome into the Information Revolution, and many more miles of infrastructure to build. We will not slow down that work.
Here’s how we can get started on an agenda to bring more of the “have-nots” into the realm of the “haves” in the short term:
First, we must remain committed to affordable connectivity options for all, injecting unprecedented competition into the mobile industry with bundled plans, and we must continue to meet lower-income families where they are on budget—that’s why low-cost options like $15 plans are so important.
Second, we must remain laser-focused on safeguarding U.S. leadership in spectrum, including preserving the entire 6GHz band for Wi-Fi use in the United States and ensuring our allies understand China’s attacks on this approach abroad. That includes increasing our attention on global standards bodies where the U.S. has lost significant ground over the last decade.
Third, we must prioritize continued innovation in our sector. Whether deploying new Wi-Fi-enabled devices in the lower 7GHz or bringing CBRS-enabled connectivity to yet another advanced manufacturing facility, we cannot rest in bringing more solutions forward to keep the world connected.
And lastly, we must ensure government is spending our tax dollars wisely and working to connect those who are unserved instead of those who are already connected. A troubling example of where we’ve gone wrong on this happened right here in Colorado with EagleNet almost 15 years ago. In fact, the last time I spoke at this event, then-NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling and I both expressed our concern about how EagleNet used federal money to overbuild wealthy school districts and city museums before those truly in need.
And this is just the start. The cable industry, or what many today refer to as the fiber connectivity industry, has left a lasting legacy in Colorado, and its unyielding capacity for reinvention foretells a bright future ahead.
Thanks to the relentless dedication of workers, constant technological innovations, and a “can-do” American spirit, I have no doubt the United States will continue to lead the world in those that “have.” It is incumbent on each of us here today to keep that a reality—and to recognize those who would take it from us, threaten what we have built and are building, or relegate us to the corner of “have nots”.
Thank you again for the opportunity to speak with you today. I hope you enjoy the rest of today’s speakers, and I look forward to working together on these important policy questions.
