What Is IEEE Communications Magazine?

IEEE Communications Magazine is a monthly publication of the IEEE Communications Society that provides tutorial-style articles on all aspects of communications technology. It serves as the flagship magazine of the Communications Society, targeting a broad professional audience that includes researchers, practicing engineers, policy specialists, and educators. Articles are intentionally written at a level accessible to readers outside the specific specialty covered in each piece, which distinguishes the magazine from the Society's more narrowly focused transactions journals. The publication covers both technical advances and nontechnical dimensions of the communications industry, including regulatory issues, business strategy, and market trends.

The magazine traces its lineage to a newsletter launched in 1963 by the IEEE Communications Society. The publication appeared under successive titles before settling on its current name in 1979, the year a full-time managing editor was hired and a sustained growth phase began. It became a monthly in 1983 and has since grown into one of the most widely read periodicals in the electrical and electronic engineering literature.

Editorial Scope and Article Types

IEEE Communications Magazine publishes peer-reviewed feature articles alongside non-peer-reviewed columns and special sections. Feature articles address telecommunications services, multimedia systems, Internet and digital infrastructure, network technology including software-defined networking and network functions virtualization, device technologies, and artificial intelligence applied to communications. Special issues with guest editors examine emerging areas in concentrated depth; recent examples have included large language model applications to network management and post-quantum cryptography in telecommunications. The magazine explicitly spans both technical content and industry context, recognizing that engineering decisions in communications are inseparable from economic and regulatory realities.

History and Publishing Format

The lineage of the magazine runs through several predecessor publications. The Communications Society newsletter, founded in 1963, evolved into Communications Society magazine in 1973, then IEEE Communications Society Magazine in 1977, and reached its current title in 1979 under the editorship of Donald Schilling, who hired Carol Lof as the first full-time managing editor. Under her tenure, advertising revenue grew by 400 percent in the first year and annual page counts expanded substantially. A 1985 readership survey found that nearly 90 percent of subscribers regularly read or scanned each issue. The full archive of published issues is indexed on the IEEE Xplore digital library, making decades of communications literature searchable by topic, author, and date.

Relationship to the IEEE Communications Society

IEEE Communications Magazine is the primary magazine vehicle of the IEEE Communications Society, which also publishes the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Communications Letters, and IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials. Within that portfolio, the magazine occupies the generalist position: it is the publication a practitioner reads to stay broadly current, while the transactions journals serve specialists seeking exhaustive technical depth. Society members receive the magazine as a membership benefit, and it functions as a central point of contact between the Society and its global membership of over 25,000 communications professionals.

Applications

IEEE Communications Magazine serves a range of roles in the communications engineering community, including:

• Professional development for engineers tracking emerging technologies across wireless, optical, and Internet systems
• Graduate and postdoctoral research, where tutorial articles give accessible entry points to unfamiliar subfields
• Standards and regulatory work, where the magazine publishes articles on policy, spectrum management, and industry standards development
• Industry planning and technology roadmapping by communications equipment and service companies
• University instruction, where accessible survey articles supplement graduate course reading lists