Tom Wheeler on the Future of Communications

The FCC Chairman Says Wireless Communications Will Cleave Us From the Legacies of Old Networks

Nothing is more seminal to our existence than how we connect. Today we are on the cusp of what could become the greatest network-driven change in history.

Mr. Wheeler is chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

125 Years of WSJ


Networks have always created places. Chicago became the nation's second city because the converging rail lines centralized economic activity. New York remains the nation's media center because it was from there that the early telegraph lines emanated.

In the new networked world, however, the power of connections is no longer centralizing. Whereas railroad, telegraph and telephone networks had to converge at a hub to exchange activity, a distributed digital network allows activity at the edges of the network without a hub.

Shaping the Future

That push began with the mating of the microprocessor and the airwaves. It is the offspring of that union that holds the promise of surpassing the railroad and telegraph and shaping the future of communications.

Moore's Law—how the power of microchips doubles about every two years—has made today's smartphone as powerful as the supercomputers of just a few years back. Lost in our complacency about such advances is how the exponential functioning of Moore's Law continues to churn forward. In only 20 years, smartphone chips will be more than 1,000 times as powerful as today!

Now, consider how connecting the power of these computers without wires transforms the ways we live and work. That there are nearly as many mobile phones as people on the planet has transformed the lives of billions. In the not-too-distant future, wireless communications will connect not just everyone, but everything. When 50 billion inanimate devices are talking to each other (Cisco's forecast for 2020), information will flow like the breeze among sensors and databases. In the process it will create new information to populate new devices and databases.

New Disrupters

Yes, unanticipated effects await us. Who would have imagined that the railroads would change Americans' diets, as the refrigerated delivery of food by rail substantially reduced prices and put meat on urban tables? A century later, who could have foreseen how mobile computing would disrupt the hotel or taxi industries as companies like Airbnb and Uber are doing? Just as local carting companies and merchants fought to keep railroads out of their towns in the 19th century, we see the hotel and taxi industries leaning on local and state governments to limit competition from digital upstarts.

Getty Images

It's not technology that will define our future—it's us. The new technology will cleave us from the comfortable legacies established by the old networks. The new era of distributed activity encourages "innovation without permission."

As such, our challenge will echo that of earlier eras confronted by new networks. We know from that history how the rewards go to those who push past network legacies and press forward to harness that which the new networks make possible.

Failed to load comments
Show More Archives

Popular on WSJ