Why has the U.S. trailed places like Japan and Europe, especially in Internet services?
One thing that was holding us back was a lack of competition, and that has changed in the past few years. Another thing that was holding us back was a lack of ubiquitous digital services. People were launching city by city. Now people are deploying it very broadly. There also has been a lack of innovation on top of the digital services that are launched. In Europe, they’ve launched short-messaging service. In Japan, they’ve launched Internet-access services. We have very little of that here. Sprint kicked off the ball in that game. Now you’re beginning to see more and more services. We’ve got most of the major Internet service providers (AOL, Yahoo!) providing service on the phone, and that brings in more customers using the new applications. The rest of world was more creative in using these new applications than we were, but now we’re beginning to catch up, and we could be in a great position as a country in the next 6 to 12 months. Q: How quickly will the wireless Web become user-fr
