The Lesson of 250 Years of American Communications: There Is No Such Thing as “Future-Proof” Technology

Remarks of Arielle Roth
Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
AEI's From Silicon to Signal: America’s First All-AI 6G Wireless Stack
July 15, 2026

The Lesson of 250 Years of American Communications: 
There Is No Such Thing as “Future-Proof” Technology

As America celebrates its 250th anniversary—and as AI becomes embedded throughout the communications stack, from silicon to signal—it is worth revisiting a familiar claim in today’s communications policy debates: that a particular technology is “future-proof.” That lesson is especially timely as we stand at the frontier of AI-native 6G, whose most transformative applications likely have not yet been imagined. History suggests policymakers should be skeptical of declaring any technology the permanent winner. Instead, they should exercise the humility to recognize that disruptive innovation has a long history of upending conventional wisdom.

For 250 years, policymakers, incumbents, and experts have repeatedly underestimated the next generation of communications technology. Again and again, innovations dismissed as inferior redefined the communications landscape. The telephone challenged the telegraph. FM challenged AM radio. Cable challenged broadcast television. Cellular transformed communications after many wrote it off as a niche service. Today, low-Earth orbit satellite systems and AI-enabled 6G networks are once again redefining what is possible.

Perhaps the defining feature of AI-native 6G is not simply that it will make communications networks more intelligent. It is that it will make the future of communications even less predictable. Previous generations of wireless networks were designed primarily to move information faster. The next generation promises networks that increasingly optimize, adapt, and derive insight from the information they carry. As intelligence becomes embedded within the network itself, we should become more humble about our ability to know which technologies, architectures, or applications will ultimately prevail.

That is the enduring lesson of American communications history: it is not a story of government identifying tomorrow’s winning technology. More often, it is a story of policymakers and incumbents underestimating the next breakthrough—and of competition proving them wrong. As new technologies challenged old ones, consumers benefited from better service, greater access, and continuous innovation.

The broadband era is a case study in that principle. Telephone companies first brought millions of Americans online via dial-up and DSL. Cable operators responded by upgrading their networks to deliver high-speed internet. Telephone companies answered with fiber to the home. Wireless providers expanded into broadband, cable companies entered the mobile business, and low-Earth orbit satellite systems are raising the competitive bar once again. This relentless cycle of facilities-based, intermodal competition produced the world’s most dynamic communications marketplace. Each forced the others to improve, producing faster speeds, lower prices, and hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment.

The data bears this out. According to a recent Phoenix Center analysis of FCC Urban Rate Survey data, real broadband prices across comparable service tiers fell by nearly 50 percent between 2020 and 2026, even as broadband speeds increased dramatically. Consumers today pay about the same inflation-adjusted price for 1 Gbps broadband that they paid for 100 Mbps just six years ago.

The same principle should guide our approach to 6G. Government’s role is not to predict which applications or business models will ultimately prevail, but to create the conditions that allow innovators to discover them through competition.

When government favors one technology, it doesn’t simply increase costs—it changes the direction of innovation itself. Capital flows toward government preferences rather than disruptive ideas. The steepest cost is often invisible: the breakthrough that never happens because investment was diverted elsewhere.

That matters most in rural America, where the greatest advances in connectivity have not come from subsidies, but from better technologies. Every major leap—from wireless broadband to today’s low-Earth orbit satellite constellations—has expanded what is technically possible while reducing the cost of serving communities that once seemed prohibitively expensive to reach. For decades, policymakers assumed that the best outcome achievable was a single subsidized wireline provider serving each rural area. Today, that assumption is rapidly becoming obsolete: Increasingly, rural Americans will choose among fiber, wireless, and multiple competing low-Earth orbit satellite systems.

The communities most often cited as the justification for technology favoritism are the ones that stand to lose the most from it. Rural Americans benefit disproportionately when innovation continues to reduce the cost of reaching hard-to-serve areas. Policies that discourage competing technologies ultimately deny those communities the very breakthroughs that are most likely to close broadband gaps.

Those principles guided the Trump Administration’s market-driven reforms to the BEAD Program. The reforms were designed not only to save taxpayer dollars but also to spend them in a way that strengthens, rather than distorts, competition, and reinforces the competitive model that has made American communications networks the strongest in the world.

By restoring technology neutrality, NTIA allowed every technology that can meet Congress’s performance standards to compete, designating performance as the “gold standard” rather than the government’s preferred technology type. The result is at least $21 billion in reduced costs—not by lowering standards, but by reinforcing the market incentives that drive continued private investment and innovation.

Fixed wireless, one of the fastest-growing broadband platforms in America, is connecting some communities in months rather than years, with advances in spectrum access, radio technology, and network equipment continuing to expand its capabilities. Meanwhile, low-Earth orbit satellite systems are connecting communities immediately, with each new generation delivering higher speeds, lower latency, greater capacity, and broader capabilities through continuous launches, more efficient payloads, inter-satellite links, and expanded spectrum access.

In today's broadband debate, fiber has often been described as “future-proof” and “the gold standard” while other technologies, such as low-Earth orbit satellite systems have been dismissed as temporary solutions. Fiber is unquestionably one of the greatest communications innovations ever developed. It is expected to continue playing a key role in supporting AI, cloud computing, advanced manufacturing, and wireless networks. But 250 years of communications history teach us that no technology should be insulated from competition or presumed to be the final word in innovation.

The point is not that today’s satellite, wireless, and fiber technologies perform identically. Each has distinct strengths and tradeoffs, offering different advantages to different consumers. The point is that all three continue to improve because they are competing. Public policy should encourage that race—not declare it over.

The lesson also extends beyond domestic broadband policy. America is engaged in a fierce global competition for leadership in communications technologies. Advanced satellite systems, 6G wireless networks, and artificial intelligence will shape the world’s economy and security for decades to come, with one defining feature of AI-native 6G expected to be the increasingly seamless integration of terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks. The agenda for the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference reflects that reality, with unprecedented attention devoted to space-based communications and the spectrum needed to support them.

Winning that competition will require more than technological excellence. It will require ensuring that innovators have access to the spectrum and open international markets needed to build next-generation networks, that international standards encourage rather than constrain innovation, and that the global regulatory environment keeps pace with technological change instead of freezing outdated assumptions in place.

That reality should also shape how we talk about American technologies at home. When senior policymakers declare fiber “future-proof” while dismissing American satellite technology as “inferior” and “the connectivity equivalent of a Band-Aid,” they do more than shape a domestic funding program. They send a signal to the rest of the world that America’s own government lacks confidence in technologies American companies are developing and exporting. That is precisely the wrong message at a time when American companies are competing globally for customers, investment, spectrum, and technological leadership.

That concern was reinforced last week as I led the U.S. delegation to the AI for Good Summit and World Summit on the Information Society Forum in Geneva, where some governments pressed to expand the role of international institutions from technical coordination bodies into centralized regulators of emerging technologies. That impulse reflects the same hubris that has accompanied so many previous efforts to predict and control the course of communications technology. We should welcome voluntary international cooperation on spectrum, interoperability, and technical standards. But in a world where AI and 6G are increasingly intertwined, top-down global governance risk slowing innovation in both.

That philosophy also underlies NTIA’s Call to Action for 6G Leadership and Security, which is bringing together trusted international partners committed to secure communications infrastructure, market-driven innovation, and standards that foster competition rather than predetermine technological outcomes. America will lead the next generation of communications not by dictating the future, but by working with like-minded nations to ensure innovators remain free to create it.

As America begins its next 250 years, that lesson is more important than ever. Artificial intelligence, AI-native 6G, and technologies we cannot yet imagine will reshape communications once again. Our responsibility is not to preserve today's technologies, but to maintain the competitive conditions that produce tomorrow's breakthroughs.

For 250 years, yesterday’s “inferior” technology has repeatedly become tomorrow’s indispensable infrastructure. If history is any guide, the defining applications of AI-native 6G have not yet been invented. Our job is not to predict them. It is to ensure that America remains the place where they are discovered.

Technology neutrality is more than a broadband policy. It is an affirmation of the American model that has made our communications sector the most innovative in the world—and it is the best way to ensure America leads the next 250 years just as it led the last.