TVA Rural Studies

Telecommunications Technology and American Rural Development in the 21st Century

Edward J. Malecki
Department of Geography
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611-7315
July 1996

2. Telecommunications: An Introduction and a Brief History

The electronic revolution has permitted a flood of innovations to collect, store, display, and transmit information. Computers, office products, and telecommunications have converged into a single "new information technology" or information-processing industry based on digital telecommunications (Forester 1987; Hall and Preston 1988; Saunders, Warford, and Wellenius 1994). Communications, along with transportation technologies, are the "enabling technologies" which have enabled multisite even global business operations (Dicken 1992: 103). At the same time, the growing globalization and spatial division of labor within firms has induced ever larger communications needs (Nicol 1985). Indeed, new communications technologies are developing in tandem with both globalization of the economy and the emergence of a knowledge-based economy and society.

Telecommunications began with the telegraph a wire-based technology that formed the foundation for the telephone networks with which most of the world is connected. Transoceanic cables linked much of the world by 1900 (Headrick 1991). Demands by businesses for the means to control information relating to production and distribution drove early applications of telematics (Beniger 1986). It was not until the 1960s, however, that the technologies of computers and electronics merged with those of broadcasting and wire-based telecommunications. As occurred a century earlier, most applications have been driven by a growing set of information technologies for business applications, such as computer-aided design, remote sensing devices, management information systems, and data bases (Arnold and Guy 1989).

Military and imperial demands also prompted innovation, especially in wireless technologies during the Second World War (Headrick 1991). Military uses, where many of the current technologies originated, have begun to utilize the dizzying array of applications and technologies now available: the system of systems, based on advanced command, control, communications, computing, and intelligence (C4I), extended information dominance providing bitstreams of information instead of providing arms, and hacker warfare, to corrupt information systems of potential foes without force (Clawson 1996). Indeed, telematics (combined with specialized software and systems) is the principal new "weapon" of the 21st century (Morton 1995).

A massive degree of innovation in telecommunications has come about only in the past 25 years since about 1970. In that time, copper wire, the basis of the world's telecommunications systems for over a century, has begun to be replaced by fiber optic cables and by satellite and other wireless technologies, such as microwave and cellular. During the same time period, computer technology evolved from word-processing and accounting to embrace image and graphic processing, requiring large quantities of data, and computers themselves evolved from large, room-sized machines to portable, personal tools. The ability to send and receive data and images, in addition to voice, effectively merged the two distinct technologies (Heldman 1994). The Internet and the World Wide Web are the present forms of this merger of the two technologies (Anderson 1995). The blending of capabilities of firms in previously distinct sectors has led to a purposeful blurring of industry boundaries (Nicholls-Nixon and Jasinski 1995). Telematics now combines at least four industries: computers, communications, software, and entertainment.

Satellite systems are a central element in global communications, providing two-thirds of all overseas telephone capacity, virtually all trans-oceanic television transmission, and private circuits for large corporations (Langdale 1989; Wheelon 1988). Fiber-optic cables have provided a new vitality to submarine cables, which had been "declared dead twice" with the introduction of the radio, and with the growing application of satellites in the 1970s. Steady decreases in the price for satellite users have created "an efficient division of business between cables and satellites." Satellites are more profitable for the transmission of pictures, and are effective for serving areas with low population density, whereas high-traffic routes are best served by fiber-optic cable (Hottes 1993: 102-103). By being able to transmit to any ground-based receiver, satellites create a more dispersed and equitable network, whereas fiber-optic cables require physical links and are point-to-point in nature (Moss 1987).

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