An FCC Chairman who Sees Benefits of Investment and Innovation
Don’t miss Edward Wyatt’s story in the New York Times and our fair editor’s posting at AEI Tech Policy Daily about FCC Chairman Wheeler’s blog on the IP Transitin – what Wheeler terms the “4th Network Revolution.”
As Richard says, it looks like the beginning of the end, though he cautions:
The big thing that the POTS-oriented crowd never takes into account is that the IP transition not only takes a lot of traditional problems and solutions off the table, it also adds some new ones. IP has some improving to do in order to meet the heavy set of needs we have as a nation for communication, and writing a standard for next-generation IP is not something we want the FCC to do.
I’m not sure who we want to do it, since the folks who tackled this problem last – the Internet Engineering Task Force – didn’t do a good job. One way to approach this would be to present IETF with a set of requirements and see that they can do with them; if it comes to that, there’s no reason not to ask ITU for input as well.
But the one thing that should be clear is that the transition away from POTS towards the more capable networks of today and tomorrow didn’t just start today, so we should not be marking beginnings as much as we should the targeting an end point.