From Gutenberg to Google

by Tom Wheeler

  The Department of Transportation’s radiotelephone leadership helped awaken the FCC. In the summer of 1968, the agency dusted off AT&T’s decade-old petition for more spectrum. It took another two years, but in 1970 the commission asked AT&T to demonstrate how a workable car phone system could be developed using the cellular concept.

  Yet there was skepticism about the airwaves being used for something as pedantic as phone calls. FCC commissioner Robert E. Lee, representing the antagonism that had held the topic back for over a decade, warned of “frivolously using spectrum” to enable people to call each other.14

  In December 1971, AT&T formally submitted to the FCC a proposal for Metroliner-like frequency reuse. It would be another six years before the FCC allowed the company to construct a demonstration trial of its proposal.

  I remember being at the FCC one day in the mid-1970s and seeing a demonstration of the cellular handoff. It was such a foreign concept that AT&T had constructed a demonstration model. A toy slot car was modified to follow a path embedded in a model landscape on a large piece of plywood. It was like a toy train layout with miniature trees and homes, except tiny lights had been buried in the landscape in a hexagonal pattern. As the car moved from one cell to another, the active cell would light up until the car reached its edge at which time the next-door cell would light up and the previous cell would go dark. It was a simple demonstration of the revolutionary concept of spectrum reuse through small, low-powered cells.

  The FCC’s delay, in part, was an echo of how earlier network innovations had been fought by those with whom they would compete or whom they might displace. Just as tavern owners and haulage companies fought to thwart the railroad’s expansion, those with vested interests in the “high tower–high power” approach to mobile telephony—existing licensees, as well as their equipment manufacturer, Motorola—used the administrative processes of the government and court appeals to slow down the progress of the new network that would compete with them.

  Finally, in 1978 the Illinois Bell subsidiary of AT&T began operating a cellular system of ten cells covering 21,000 square miles around Chicago. It would be another five years before the Regional Bell Operating Company Ameritech would begin commercial cellular service.15 During that interlude, cellular service was launched in Tokyo (1979), Mexico City (1981), and cities throughout Europe.

  The most significant development to emerge from the FCC’s lengthy consideration of the rules for cellular networks was the decision to ditch Theodore Vail’s “natural monopoly.” When the FCC finally allocated spectrum for mobile service, it did so to two competitive providers in each market. One of those licensees would be the local phone company, the other an entrepreneurial competitor.

  Theodore Vail must have somersaulted in his grave! The “natural monopoly” was no more. The introduction of competition into the mobile telephone market accelerated deployment, stimulated innovation, expanded service, drove down prices, and ultimately spilled over into Vail’s wired network.

  At the time, however, no one understood the Rubicon that had just been crossed. The operating assumption that wireless connectivity was just as Theodore Vail had forecast in 1916—only an ancillary service—was illustrated by a 1980 study AT&T commissioned from McKinsey & Company. In response to the telephone company’s request to forecast the demand for cell phones, the consultants forecasted there would be 900,000 cellular subscribers in the year 2000.16

  Redefining a World without Wires

  In 1992, as president of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), I traveled to the small town of Thibodaux, Louisiana, to recognize the nation’s symbolic 10-millionth cellular subscriber. The McKinsey forecast had fallen significantly short of the mark. With eight years remaining until the century mark, wireless phone penetration was already more than ten times greater than the McKinsey consultants had predicted for the end of the century. By the time the millennium finally rolled around, wireless subscriptions in the United States were approaching 100 million, 100 times greater than the consultants’ forecast.17

  The 10-millionth U.S. subscriber was symbolic of the change the new technology was bringing to the way people led their lives and conducted their business. The designated 10-millionth subscriber was a large-animal veterinarian. At the celebratory luncheon in Thibodaux, she told the story of tending to an injured animal out in a field when her new cell phone rang with an emergency call from a client whose cow was in labor with a breeched calf. She marveled at how previously she would have been unreachable. Now, however, from another farmer’s field she gave instructions and then rushed off to tend to the animal in distress.

  It all seems so common to us now that the veterinarian would be reachable in an emergency; wireless connectivity has so rapidly changed our lives that it is hard to recall the unconnected isolation that was so recently the accepted norm. By 2012, this freedom and convenience were causing consumers to desert Theodore Vail’s wired network to such an extent that more than half of all American homes did not have or did not use the wired telephone network.18

  In the developed world, among the already connected, the introduction of wireless networks has increased productivity and enhanced convenience. In the developing world, among the never connected, it has changed the patterns of life itself. In Bangladesh a call to 7-8-9 on a mobile phone connects to the Healthline medical call center, where a doctor diagnoses symptoms and prescribes treatment. Calling the doctor is a simple application of wireless access, but in a nation with only five health care workers per 10,000 people, that connectivity is lifesaving.

  In seaside India, checking a mobile phone before venturing onto the ocean can warn fishermen of weather over the horizon that could swamp their boats. After they return from a successful catch, a call from the boat tells the fishermen which port is paying the highest price. The fishermen’s profits have increased by 8 percent, while the improved coordination of supply and demand has reduced consumer prices by 4 percent.19

  Like the network revolutions that preceded it, the mobile network has produced innovative and unanticipated applications. The fee for the Bangladesh Healthline medical consultation (about 21 cents for three minutes), for instance, is paid by deducting it from the phone’s prepaid airtime balance.20

  The prepayment to the mobile operator for minutes of airtime has created a new asset class for individuals who have never seen a bank and never had a savings account. Airtime remittances use mobile minutes as a pseudo-currency that can be transferred between phones and exchanged for goods.21

  In Senegal, another unexpected derivative of mobile connectivity has produced another unexpected benefit: text messages have become an impetus for literacy. Historically, African cultures were based on an oral tradition without much day-to-day need for literacy. Only a few in each village were selected for the “unproductive” effort of learning to read and write while all the others did useful labor. Daily crop, weather, and health information via text messages, however, is creating a new demand for literacy, as well as the means to practice reading skills.22

  Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mohamed Yunus has argued, “The quickest way to get rid of poverty is to provide everyone with a mobile phone.”23 A World Bank study found that every 10 percent increase in mobile phone penetration in a developing country increased GDP per person by 0.8 percent.24

  From Voice to Data

  Events in the South African township of Soweto helped awaken the world to the outrage of apartheid. As I stood in the gate of a schoolyard in one of Soweto’s shanty towns, the local women were lined up across the dirt road at the communal water spigot awaiting their turn to fill empty cans. Behind me, inside the school compound, the children could access the internet using wirelessly connected laptops. The juxtaposition was striking.

  The Soweto laptops were part of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which made available specially constructed and ruggedized computers capable of creating their own wireless mesh network in which each laptop acts as its
own send/receive router. Each computer links through the air with the others and ultimately to an internet access point.25 The laptops exemplify how most of the world’s young people, whether in developed or developing nations, will have their first internet experience via a wireless connection.

  Worldwide, the data traffic on mobile networks is greater than that of voice traffic, and it continues to grow.26 Like the analog wired network, the analog wireless network was pressed into the delivery of data by “tricking” the network to carry digital traffic disguised in analog form. It wasn’t until fourth-generation (4G) wireless technology began rolling out early in the second decade of the twenty-first century that wireless networks completed the transition to fully digital IP systems with broadband speeds. And because it is a packet-switched—rather than circuit-switched—network, costs are significantly below that of earlier generations of dedicated circuit wireless infrastructure, allowing its capabilities to extend even further.

  The wireless revolution has not stopped with 4G, however. One of the most significant decisions of my tenure at the FCC was the identification of pieces of the airwaves to be used by fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology. While earlier generations of wireless technology evolved from voice to data (just as the wired network had), 5G was the first technology to be built from the ground up for the purpose of microcomputers talking to microcomputers. The 5G network will operate at speeds up to 100 times faster than 4G, with the capacity to handle a million transmitting chips per square kilometer, and with latency (the time required to deliver the data) as low as one one-thousandth of a second.

  The new network revolution has come to pass: the convergence of portable digital processing with wirelessly delivered, IP-based services. It is the marriage of forces that began centuries ago. The computing technology that evolved from Charles Babbage’s work to the microprocessor, the binary impulses of the telegraph, and Gutenberg’s idea of breaking information into its smallest usable parts have all combined to redefine how we connect, and how we live.

  Shaping Our Now

  Chapter 8 explores some of the consequences of the digital wireless revolution. At this point, however, let’s consider three real-time results and how they echo previous network changes: their impact on social patterns, their unanticipated results, and how change sparks cycles of concern and opposition.

  The last network revolution of the railroad and the telegraph/telephone redefined the nature of individual interaction that had existed since the dawn of the agrarian age. Prior to the railroad, most people lived to produce for themselves or a small local economy. Even the principal cities were a shadow of what they would become as a result of rail connectivity. The notion of “community” was geographically limited to the family with occasional extensions to a neighboring market center.

  The centralizing force of the railroad pulled people from a rural life of individual self-sufficiency to deposit them into melting pots of masses of workers and their families. With people piled into urban tenements, life spilled out onto stoops and streets to define an expanded sense of community built around not only physical interactions at the local market and at work, but also the fact that they simply couldn’t get out of each other’s way.

  As wireless networks have untethered individuals, they have redefined the nature of community. The last network revolution produced a collective community. The new network is delivering what appears to be a contradiction: an individualized community.

  It used to be that physical place defined everything from friendships to ideologies and bowling leagues. Wireless connectivity has made physical proximity irrelevant. To a wireless user, the relevant community comprises the people in their mobile device’s contact list with whom it’s possible to instantaneously connect, regardless of physical location.

  In the process, the concept of being “alone” has evolved. Prior to mobile devices, being alone meant physical isolation. Now, however, “alone” has become “not connected.” When a person’s solitary walk through the park is interrupted by a ringing phone, that person is no longer alone. A teenager by herself in her room texting her friends is not isolated.

  When Thoreau, complaining about the telegraph, said that “Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate,” he could not have been more off target.27 New networks accelerate the desire to communicate.

  The reality of the twenty-first century is that the ability to communicate makes it necessary to communicate.

  Today the wireless network goes one step further to redefine what it means to communicate. First, the mobile phone removed the need to be in a specific location to exchange information: situating oneself at the front stoop, or the telegraph office, or where the phone wire came through the wall is no longer necessary. As a result, in the mobile world, “place” no longer exists.28 Mobile technology makes it possible to be present without being in attendance.

  The mobile device then adds another “nonplace” dimension by allowing us to be physically present with one group while involved with another. Interrupting a face-to-face conversation to answer a mobile phone call departs from the physical in favor of virtual proximity. Sitting in a meeting while checking email on a mobile device makes the user only partially present and erodes the importance of place even further. In the ultimate withdrawal from the physical, the mobile phone allows its user to consciously seek isolation from those with whom they are physically present. Mobile messaging usage is high in Japan, for instance, because subway riders, packed like sardines, retreat to their virtual communities, isolating themselves from the crowd around them by transporting themselves to connect to another, more intimate group.

  The communities in which wireless users live are significantly smaller and less random than their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors. One study discovered that about half of a person’s mobile phone calls and text messages are sent to a limited group of only three or four people.29 Such small communities, limited to the family and a small group of friends, echo the pre-industrial era.

  Mobile connectivity can be Janus-like. On one face, small virtual communities of families and friends become emotionally closer because of constant connectivity. The other face reflects the ease with which an individual can retreat from the physical world into a wireless zone of comfort that reduces the creation of proximity-triggered relationships.

  Beyond the changing nature of community, the history we have reviewed establishes that the transformational impact of a new network is not the primary network itself, but the unanticipated ways in which people put the networks to use. Printing could be logically expected to spread information, but its impact on navigation and commerce was less obvious. The railroad’s unanticipated effect on urbanization became obvious only in retrospect. The telegraph obviously sent messages at near light speed, but its effect on the national spread of news or finance was unforeseen.

  The historical pattern of nonobvious network effects continues in the new digital mobile environment. We have already seen how in developing parts of the world the mobile network has produced unanticipated consequences from pseudo-currency to the increased demand for literacy. In the developed (read: “already connected”) world, unanticipated applications continue to redefine the mobile device’s impact on our lives.

  Consider, for instance, ubiquitous text messages from one mobile device to another. Today users send billions of text messages daily, yet it was never intended to be this way.

  Included in the GSM standard for mobile devices was the ability to use the mobile network’s control channel (the pathway that controls the call but doesn’t carry the call itself) to send short alphanumeric messages. It was envisioned principally as a means for one-way communication from the company to the subscriber (such as “Your bill is due”). That changed when the functionality was discovered by Norwegian teenagers in the late 1980s.30

  It seemed illogical that consumers would send a text message using the Short Message Service (SMS). First, the original form
of text messaging required a seemingly endless number of keystrokes per word. The letter c, for instance, required hitting the phone’s “2” key three times to toggle through a and then b before reaching c. The simple message “Running five minutes late,” for instance, required forty-nine keystrokes on the mobile keypad. It was so illogical that the mobile operators never established a tariff to charge for the capability. And, on top of that awkwardness, the message was limited to 160 characters.

  But “free” and “something my elders don’t understand” were magic for teenagers. Not only could they “talk” as much as they wanted and pay nothing (at a time when voice calls were charged on a per-minute basis, often at rates of 25 cents per minute or higher), their parents didn’t understand the technology, let alone the shorthand code developed to keep messages short (such as LOL for “laughing out loud”). Spread by the teens’ powerful network, text messaging took off—and not just in Norway. By the time mobile operators awakened (and had to add network capacity to carry the influx), the volume of text messages numbered in the billions. As mobile operators began to charge for the service, it became an unanticipated, high-margin, big-profit activity.

  Then the unanticipated struck again.

  The original SMS standard imposed a quasi-digital peer-to-peer protocol on the analog mobile network. As mobile networks went digital, however, they challenged the primacy of the proprietary SMS capability. Competitive services using the open IP platform, rather than the closed SMS platform, began springing up—and, once again, those services were “free.” Much as Skype rides the internet to provide “free” voice calls, independent texting services use IP-based messaging to bypass the mobile operator’s SMS platform. The resulting relief to the consumer’s pocketbook hit mobile operators’ bottom lines hard. In the new network world, the unanticipated giveth as well as taketh away.