A Year in Review: The FCC and the US Phone Transition

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler has been on the job for just over a year. And with 2014 coming to a close, we look back at the accomplishments of the FCC in his first year. One of the great challenges the FCC faces in coming months and years -- and which Wheeler recognized during his confirmation -- is guiding the transformation of the U.S. telephone system. This is no small task. The U.S. system is, perhaps, the best in the world, encompasses 1.5 billion miles of wire and some 120 million phones. And despite its great complexity, it has operated with near-perfect reliability for some 125 years through snow and rain and heat and gloom of night. The challenge now is to ensure the phone system can work just as well as it moves from an analog, circuit-switched network to a digital, packet-switched network. Before his nomination to chair the FCC, Wheeler was the chairman of the FCC's Technological Advisory Council, which has been wrestling with that phone transition (known to wonks as the “IP transition” for Internet protocol). Just days after his confirmation as FCC chair, Wheeler announced boldly The IP Transition: Starting Now and began to redirect the wonky “IP” language to move people to start thinking about the transition as “a series of transitions”; “a multi-faceted revolution that advances as the packets of Internet Protocol (IP)-based communication replace the digital stream of bits and analog frequency waves.”