Why I urge rapid closing on T-Mobile Sprint deal:
Former FCC Chair Reed Hundt
PUBLISHED MON, DEC 2 20191:51 PM EST
Reed Hundt, former FCC chair
As FCC chair in the 1990s I
opposed mergers in radio, among Baby Bells, and later between T-Mobile and AT&T. In 2014, I declined to help Sprint buy T-Mobile. But when this time around Sprint
asked if I would advise them on how to close their acquisition by T-Mobile I said, absolutely yes.
The reason is
that the demands of technological progress have changed remarkably in a few short years. With the conditions imposed by the federal and state governments including limits on consumer prices and job preservation, the new company and its competitors
will help cause the long-awaited convergence of computing and communications necessary to stimulate new economic growth and produce new ways for society to benefit from technology.
For decades communications and computing industries have had only limited relationships to each other. Even today for example, most personal computers do not
connect directly to a cellular network only accessing the Internet through embedded Wi-Fi.
On the other
hand, fewer than 500 big data centers effectively govern the critical computer calculations of the modern world. These data centers run by Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and their Chinese counterparts transmit massive information
over thousands of miles at nearly the speed of light to and from businesses through fiber optic cables.
Yet close to three decades after the Internet
became the critical commercial medium, we still do not have really high-speed broadband to every home. Moreover, the concentration of influence in the owners of these data centers justly gives cause for concern.
But the break-out of newly robust competition and innovation is near at hand.
The formula is 5G meets AI, producing brave new world.
The
next evolution in wireless 5G, or the fifth generation of digital wireless technology launched on my watch at the FCC will expand the data carrying capacity of wireless networks by as much as 1000 times. Millions of sensors
measuring devices with radios will record the observable world, watching traffic patterns, measuring greenhouse gas emissions, monitoring heart rates, tracking robots in dangerous industrial operations.
Networks built for 5G will gather all this information and transmit it probably less than a mile away, in milliseconds, where computers resembling the big
centralized data centers, but at smaller scale, will apply the mathematical calculations generally known as artificial intelligence (AI).
This
number-crunching will enable the seemingly magical instructions and predictions that are the essence of AI: redirecting traffic, spotting environmental problems, sending someone to the hospital before the heart attack, making the robots do the hard
work.
These services must be created close to where the information is obtained because the results of AI calculations have to be delivered to the point
of use in milliseconds even at the speed of light information cannot be sent thousands of miles, analyzed, and then sent back in time to obtain factory efficiency or save a life.