Trends in Telecommunications: A War of the Wires.
The telecommunications industry is undergoing change at an unbelievable pace. Clearly, "Trends In Telecommunications" is a topic that we could discuss for hours, days, or months. However, tonight I just want to touch on some high points, and take any questions that you may have.
Some of you may remember the days when homes had one black rotary dial telephone, hard-wired into the wall. Your local and long distance service was all provided by one company ... probably Ma Bell.
Contrast that with today ... just take a look at your business card ... I daresay that most of you will have at least two phone numbers listed: a business phone and a fax number. You might also have listed: a cellular phone number; a pager number; and an email or Internet address. Your card is a lot more cluttered with numbers than it was 10-15 years ago!
There is good reason why we are said to be in the midst of a Telecommunications Revolution!
But let me suggest that it is more than a revolution. It is, in fact, a war. And at least one person has termed today's telecommunications environment a "War of the Wires." I'll come back to that in a moment.
First, let's step back a few millennia, to when today's communications capabilities really had their start ...
You could say that the first major advance in communications occurred about 75,000 years ago. According to many experts, that's when our ancestors first developed the art of speech.
For the next 74,850 years or so, communications was limited only by how loud you could yell or how fast a messenger could run or ride a horse. Technology shattered those limits with the development of the telegraph in the 1830s, the telephone in 1876 and the radio in 1896.
In my mind, the next major breakthrough in communications came in 1969 with the advent of the ARPAnet, the governmental father of today's Internet.
From a network of four universities in 1969, the Internet expanded across the country to 10,000 users by 1980. Today, an estimated 100 million users worldwide are linked by the Internet ... and 300 million are predicted by 2002. The Internet is the fastest growing technology in history. And yet, when you consider that there are nearly 6 billion people in the world, the number of Internet users (less than 2%) is almost trivial. The growth prospects for the Internet are clearly enormous.
