What are the long-range historical trends?
Although, over its first 130 years, the field of telecommunications experienced a great many changes, these changes were nonetheless fairly contained. Telecommunications remained provided by – or heavily regulated by – government. The uses remained relatively separate, stable end-to-end services that everyone understood as telecommunications. This was, for the most part, slowly and carefully studied and planned by central bodies according to well-understood criteria. Today, although some traditional kinds of public telecommunication – such as telephony – superficially appear the same, the technology, the applications, and in fact almost everything about telecommunications is now fundamentally different. Telecommunications has been transformed into an information system business, and success in the information system business seems to require an open marketplace. The convergence of the broadcasting, computing and telecommunications industries has further blurred the distinctions between
