  At the classical level the electromagnetic field can be well identified at
the spatial infinity. Staruszkiewicz pointed out that the quantization of the
electromagnetic field at spatial infinity is essentially unique and follows
from the two fundamental principles: 1) gauge invariance and 2) canonical
commutation relations for canonically conjugated generalized coordinates, and
constructed a simple and mathematically transparent quantum theory of the
Coulomb field, predicting (among other things) a relation between the theory of
unitary representations of the $SL(2, \mathbb{C})$ group and the fine structure
constant. Until now this theory has stayed outside the main stream of the
perturbative development in QED, mainly due to the unsolved infra-red-type (IR)
problems in the perturbative approach. Recently however there has been
performed a more careful analysis of free fields including the mass less free
gauge fields, such as the electromagnetic potential field, their Wick and
chronological products, which revealed the need for a more careful and white
noise construction of these fields, and which opened a way to resolve IR
problems (at least those which shows up at each order separately). Comparison
of the perturbatively constructed field at spatial infinity with the quantum
phase field of the Staruszkiewicz theory leads to the proof of universality of
the unit of charge.
