59
In the 2015 Order, the Commission determined that it
should expand its definition of the public switched network in
that fashion to “reflect[] the current network landscape.” 30
FCC Rcd. at 5779 ¶ 391; see id. at 5786 ¶ 399. The
Commission took note of “evidence of the extensive changes
that have occurred in the mobile marketplace.” Id. at 5785–
86 ¶ 398. For instance, as of the end of 2014, nearly threequarters “of the entire U.S. age 13+ population was
communicating with smart phones,” and “by 2019,”
according to one forecast, “North America will have nearly
90% of its installed base[] converted to smart devices and
connections.” Id. at 5785 ¶ 398. In addition, the Commission
noted that the “hundreds of millions of consumers” who
already “use[d] mobile broadband” as of 2015 could “send or
receive communications to or from anywhere in the nation,
whether connected with other mobile broadband subscribers,
fixed broadband subscribers, or the hundreds of millions of
websites available to them over the Internet.” Id. Those
significant
developments,
the
Commission
found,
“demonstrate[] the ubiquity and wide scale use of mobile
broadband Internet access service today.” Id. at 5786 ¶ 398.
The upshot is that, just as mobile voice (i.e., cellular
telephone) service in 1994 provided “ubiquitous access” for
members of the public to communicate with one another
“from anywhere in the nation,” mobile broadband by 2015
had come to provide the same sort of ubiquitous access. Id. at
5779–80 ¶ 391, 5785–86 ¶¶ 398–99. And the ubiquitous
access characterizing both mobile voice and mobile
broadband stands in marked contrast to “the private mobile
service[s] of 1994, such as a private taxi dispatch service,
services that offered users access to a discrete and limited set
of endpoints.” Id. at 5789 ¶ 404; see 1994 Order, 9 FCC Rcd.
at 1414 ¶ 4. In recognition of the similarity of mobile
broadband to mobile voice as a universal medium of
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