Plunkett's Telecommunications Industry Almanac is the only complete reference guide to the telecommunications technologies and companies that are changing the way the world communicates today. This massive reference book's market research section provides our famous trends analysis, as well as major statistical tables. You will receive an abundance of data on statistics, new telecommunications technologies, markets, the Internet, land lines, VOIP, unified communications and leading telecommunications companies. In the corporate profiles section, you'll receive vital details on the Telecommunications 500 Firms, the largest, most successful corporations in all facets of the telecommunications business on a worldwide basis, both public and private. These in-depth profiles include corporate names, addresses, phone and fax numbers, web sites, growth plans, competitive advantage, financial histories and up to 27 executive contacts by title. You will also find information regarding local exchange and long distance telephone service markets and trends, wireless and cellular telephone markets and trends, satellite telecommunications, Wi-Fi, telephone industry equipment, software and support. You'll find a complete overview, industry analysis and market research report in one superb, value-priced package.

Telecommunication Services provides a holistic approach to understand telecommunications systems by addressing the emergence and domination of new digital services, consumer and economic dynamics, and the creation of content by service providers. * Includes services, underlying technologies, and internal capabilities for social network advertising * Covers market dynamics that determine the successes and failures of service offerings * Discusses the impact of smartphones (iPhone launch) on the telecommunications and mobile device industry

The completion of the Transcontinental Telegraph in 1861 completed telegraphy's mile-by-mile trek across the West. In addition to linking the coasts, the telegraph represented an extraordinary American effort in many fields of endeavor to know, act upon, and control a continent. Merging new research with bold interpretation, James Schwoch details the unexplored dimensions of the frontier telegraph and its impact. The westward spread of telegraphy entailed encounters with environments that challenged Americans to acquire knowledge of natural history, climate, and a host of other fields. Telegraph codes and ciphers, meanwhile, became important political, military, and economic secrets. Schwoch shows how the government's use of commercial networks drove a relationship between the two sectors that served increasingly expansionist aims. He also reveals the telegraph's role in securing high ground and encouraging surveillance. Both became vital aspects of the American effort to contain, and conquer, the West's indigenous peoples—and part of a historical arc of concerns about privacy, data gathering, and surveillance that remains pertinent today. Entertaining and enlightening, Wired into Nature explores an unknown history of the West.

When the need for telephone operators arose in the 1870s, the assumption was that they should all be male. Wages for adult men were too high, so boys were hired. They proved quick to argue with subscribers, so females replaced them. Women were calmer, had reassuring voices and rarely talked back. Within a few years, telephone operators were all female and would remain so. The pay was low and working conditions harsh. The job often impaired their health, as they suffered abuse from subscribers in silence under pain of dismissal. Discipline was stern-dress codes were mandated, although they were never seen by the public. Most were young, domestic and anything but militant. Yet many joined unions and walked picket lines in response to the severely capitalistic, sexist system they worked under.

Telecommunication has undergone unprecedented change in recent times. Two hundred years ago, Sir Francis Ronalds foresaw its development and imagined a world of 'electrical conversations'. His subsequent creations, the most important of which include an early version of the telegraph, have had significant impact on modern living. Little recognized until now, his extraordinary legacy is brought to life through never-before published sources written by people close to the man himself.In this book, details of Sir Francis's inventions - covering areas as diverse as electrical devices, weather forecasting, photography, art, mass production, and even fishing - are interwoven with personal and professional tales of achievement. Fresh light is shone on controversies and precedence in several important discoveries. Using both anecdotal and scientific evidence, it is written for those interested in the pursuit of science in the 19th century and the fascinating developments which have proved essential to the technological revolution of the 21st century.

Model your company's future on the success of tech's quiet giant BusinessWeek once listed Chinese tech firm Huawei as one of the ten most influential companies on the planet, and Time placed its founder Ren Zhengfei in the top 100 most influential men in the world. Once considered an insignificant upstart bound for failure like so many other early tech companies, Huawei is now a $62 billion company employing 190,000 people worldwide. Huawei's upward trajectory is the classic story of a company that beat all the odds. Founded in 1987 with 20,000 RMB, Huawei took on all the IT powerhouses during times of major market upheaval and has come out on top-all due to the clarity of vision, powerful sense of purpose, and sheer work ethic of its founder. The Huawei Way provides practical lessons on how Ren Zhengfei led his company to a level of success no one in the world predicted. As telecom's old greats like Motorola, Nokia, and Siemens continue to struggle from the effects of recession, Huawei continues to grow because it never stops innovating. Its success is self-driven because the company, reflecting is its founder, maintains a relentless dedication R while other companies, fueled by fear, are scaling down R&D to save money, Huawei is ramping it up. And it's paying off big time. Both entertaining and instructive, The Huawei Way traces the rise of one of today's greatest tech companies to provide valuable business and management lessons anyone can apply to any company, in any industry.

The history of the post office involves many of the most significant themes in the social, economic and political history of Britain. Daunton traces the development of the post office as an institution and as a business in the 19th and 20th centuries and places the debates surrounding its history, performances and failings in a longer historical perspective and in the broader context of British national history.

After broadband access, what next? What role do metrics play in understanding "information societies"? And, more important, in shaping their policies? Beyond counting people with broadband access, how can economic and social metrics inform broadband policies, help evaluate their outcomes, and create useful models for achieving national goals? This timely volume not only examines the traditional questions about broadband, like availability and access, but also explores and evaluates new metrics more applicable to the evolving technologies of information access. Beyond Broadband Access brings together a stellar array of media policy scholars from a wide range of disciplines-economics, law, policy studies, computer science, information science, and communications studies. Importantly, it provides a well-rounded, international perspective on theoretical approaches to databased communications policymaking in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Showcasing a diversity of approaches, this invaluable collection helps to meet myriad challenges to improving the foundations for communications policy development.

Identifying a form of government intervention in social and economic affairs called public service liberalism, Alan Stone looks to that ideology to confront the problems of the 1990s and beyond. He shows in this fascinating case study that the policy has been effective in the past: the American telephone industry from its inception until 1934 is an illustration of how public service liberalism served both economic efficiency and a complex structure of public values. Stone depicts the stages by which public service liberalism was replaced by less adequate policies and suggests ways that it could be successfully restored. Furthermore, Stone demonstrates that government-business relationships like the one that prevailed in the telephone industry were common in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. He argues that this period was not an era of laissez-faire, as is often alleged, but that its economic energy and extraordinary technological progress were accompanied by complete acceptance of certain kinds of government intervention. Challenging the presuppositions not only of the new ideologists of deregulation, privatization, and competition but also of the practitioners of what he calls the "sanctimonious muddle" of present-day liberalism, Stone demonstrates that public service liberalism could help resolve current problems, such as those in the savings and loan institutions and the cable television industry.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"The twenty-first-century telecommunications landscape is radically different from the one that prevailed as recently as the last decade of the twentieth century. Robert Litan and Hal Singer argue that given the speed of innovation in this sector, the Federal Communications Commission's outdated policies and rules are inhibiting investment in the telecom industry, specifically in fast broadband networks. This pithy handbook presents the kind of fundamental rethinking needed to bring communications policy in line with technological advances. Fast broadband has huge societal benefits, enabling all kinds of applications in telemedicine, entertainment, retailing, education, and energy that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Those benefits would be even greater if the FCC adopted policies that encouraged more broadband providers, especially wireless providers, to make their services available in the roughly half of the country where consumers currently have no choice in wireline providers offering download speeds that satisfy the FCC's current standards. The authors' recommendations include allowing broadband providers to charge for premium delivery services; embracing a rule-of-reason approach to all matters involving vertical arrangements; stripping the FCC of its merger review authority because both the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department have the authority to stop anticompetitive mergers; eliminating the FCC's ability to condition spectrum purchases on the identity, business plans, or spectrum holdings of a bidder; and freeing telephone companies from outdated regulations that require them to maintain both a legacy copper network and a modem IP network. These changes and others advanced in this book would greatly enhance consumer welfare with respect to telecommunications services and the applications built around them. "

A vital instrument of power, telecommunications is and has always been a political technology. In this book, Headrick examines the political history of telecommunications from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II. He argues that this technology gave society new options. In times of peace, the telegraph and radio were, as many predicted, instruments of peace; in times of tension, they became instruments of politics, tools for rival interests, and weapons of war. Writing in a lively, accessible style, Headrick illuminates the political aspects of information technology, showing how in both World Wars, the use of radio led to a shadowy war of disinformation, cryptography, and communications intelligence, with decisive consequences.

Wireless entrepreneurs are transforming the way people live and work around the globe. In the process they have created some of the fastest growing companies on the planet. Anytime, Anywhere tells the story of the birth and explosion of cellular and wireless communications as seen through the eyes of one of the industry's pioneers, Sam Ginn. As deregulation and privatization swept the globe, Ginn and his team at AirTouch Communications fought for and won licenses on several continents. They built a successful business using strategic partnerships and joint ventures and demonstrated a new model for global entrepreneurship in an information-based economy. Louis Galombos is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He has written numerous books and articles on entrepreneurship, innovation and regulation, including Networks of Innovation (Cambridge, 1996) and The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth (Basic, 1989), He is President of the Business History Group. Eric Abrahamson is Principal Historian with The Prologue Group. His research has dealt with telecommunications, banking and regulation in California.

Sorting Letters, Sorting Lives offers an examination of a workplace that for many years has employed an extraordinarily diverse workforce: the United States Postal Service. In the post-civil rights era, the Postal Service took a leading role in managing a diverse workforce, seeking to acknowledge and honor the different groups and cultures represented among its workforce. The USPS has constantly been looking for ways to motivate its employees, to create a sense of fairness and belonging, and to minimize interpersonal and inter-group conflicts. Linda Benbow examines the organizational culture and levels of diversity found in an urban United States Postal Service mail processing facility. She shows how employee perceptions of social differences and their interactions with coworkers contribute to their identity and work life within the organization. Painting detailed portraits of race, social class, and gender in a mail processing facility, Benbow looks at ways employees of diverse backgrounds relate to one another, identifying the issues and occasions that provoke conflict, the ways that participants view one another, and the forces and strategies that mitigate and conciliate conflicts. This richly detailed account of a historically diverse urban post office provides a fascinating look at the dynamics of race and gender in the workplace.

How does a telecommunications company function when its right hand often doesn't know what its left hand is doing? How do rapidly expanding, interdisciplinary organizations hold together and perform their knowledge work? In this book, Clay Spinuzzi draws on two warring theories of work activity - activity theory and actor-network theory - to examine the networks of activity that make a telecommunications company work and thrive. In doing so, Spinuzzi calls a truce between the two theories, bringing them to the negotiating table to parley about work. Specifically, about net work: the coordinative work that connects, coordinates, and stabilizes polycontextual work activities. To develop this uneasy dialogue, Spinuzzi examines the texts, trades, and technologies at play at Telecorp, both historically and empirically. Drawing on both theories, Spinuzzi provides new insights into how net work actually works and how our theories and research methods can be extended to better understand it.

Goran Palm - a well-known Swedish writer and poet - went to work incognito in one of the factories of LM Ericsson. He did this to obtain a better understanding of the life of the manual worker in a large factory, and to gain from that understanding a more mature political view. Going into a factory and joining a particular work group enabled the author to see beyond the monolithic idea of the working class and to know and appreciate his fellow workers as individuals. The writing is more literary than scientific, the language is concrete, and portraits, satire and dialogue are mixed to provide a full and lively picture into which the development of Palm's ideas is inserted. His particular concern is the worker's tendency to regard work as a depressing overture to the leisure time constantly in his thoughts. This is what Palm means by The Flight from Work.

This book analyses telecommunications markets from early to mature competition, filling the gap between the existing economic literature on competition and the real-life application of theory to policy. Paul De Bijl and Martin Peitz focus on both the transitory and the persistent asymmetries between telephone companies, investigating the extent to which access price and retail price regulation stimulate both short- and long-term competition. They explore and compare various settings, such as non-linear versus linear pricing, facilities-based versus unbundling-based or carrier-select-based competition, non-segmented versus segmented markets. On the basis of their analysis, De Bijl and Peitz then formulate guidelines for policy. This book is a valuable resource for academics, regulators and telecommunications professionals. It is accompanied by simulation programs devised by the authors both to establish and to illustrate their results.

The mobile telecommunications industry is one of the most rapidly growing sectors around the world. This book offers a comprehensive economic analysis of the main determinants of growth in the industry. Harald Gruber demonstrates the importance of competitive entry and the setting of technological standards, both of which play a central role in their contribution to the fast diffusion of technology. Detailed country studies provide empirical evidence for the development of the main themes: the diffusion of mobile telecommunications services, the pricing policies in network industries, the role of entry barriers such as radio spectrum and spectrum allocation procedures. This research-based survey will appeal to a wide range of applied industrial economists within universities, government and the industry itself.

Although they were operational for little more than sixty years, the Royal Mail Coaches left behind an indelible romantic memory. But, journeys on the coaches were probably seldom the happy-go-lucky events depicted on the cards. The seating inside the coach was hardly luxurious. This work talks about these coaches.

This 2005 book is a comparative history of the economic organisation of energy, telecommunications and transport in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the role that private and public enterprise have played in the construction and operation of the railways, electricity, gas and water supply, tramways, coal, oil and natural gas industries, telegraph, telephone, computer networks and other modern telecommunications. The book begins with the arrival of the railways in the 1830s, charts the development of arms' length regulation, municipalisation and nationalisation, and ends on the eve of privatisation in the 1980s. Robert Millward argues that the role of ideology, especially in the form of debates about socialism and capitalism, has been exaggerated. Instead the driving forces in changes in economic organisation were economic and technological factors and the book traces their influence in shaping the pattern of regulation and ownership of these key sectors of modern economies.

As the Internet revolution continues to unfold and transform telecommunications, pressure is building for faster, less expensive, and more widely accessible broadband service. Such a development would facilitate improved and less expensive traditional applications such as voice telephony and web browsing. It would also enable new and useful applications such as Internet-based television, videoconferencing, and software distribution. Broadband has great potential to improve efficiency and productivity, even to improve national security in some cases. Broadband service and affordability, however, have consistently lagged well behind demand and progress in information technology, with damaging results. The Internet revolution remains incomplete and threatens to stagnate if the situation continues. In The Broadband Problem, economist and technology entrepreneur Charles H. Ferguson explains the causes and ramifications of this damaging bottleneck, and he offers suggestions on improving the current state of affairs. He asserts that current telecommunications law and policy have not provided sufficient levels of new entry, competition, and innovation in the local telecom market. The continuing dominance of ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) in that market impedes the healthy, and much-needed, development of an efficient broadband market. The result of these policy and market failures is inadequate technological progress, innovation, and productivity in advanced Internet services and telecommunication services generally. The broadband problem is holding us back, and thus must be addressed and solved. With this important volume, Charles Ferguson has contributed mightily to that mission.

"This title presents the case that opening international voice communication to competition is key to reform the telecommunications sector, is sustainable in developing countries, and results in major gains to consumers, businesses, and to the economy.

Over the last 20 years full competition became a dominant attribute in virtually all high-income countries and in selected developing countries. Three forces were behind competition: globalization, technological change, and the emergence of international telecommunications as an enabler for integration and trade.

Now over 80 percent of global voice traffic originates in fully competitive markets. Resistance to competition remains strong in several developing countries, even though countries such as Chile and El Salvador have demonstrated spectacular success in introducing and sustaining competition. A spectrum of reasons for resistance to competition exist. Some reasons are telecommunications-specific (lack of technical, regulatory and business skills, fear of bankrupting the incumbent operator). Other reasons are systemic, such as: (a) concern over fiscal losses, (b) lack of political influence by pressure groups favoring competition, (c) corruption, and (d) restrictions over information flows. Competition in international communications is also a matter of economic freedom.

"Competition in International Voice Communications" makes a case for opening developing country markets quickly rather than gradually as well as identifies regulatory matters that need to be tackled in opening the markets to competition: regulatory reform, better licensing, interconnection and universal service regime."

'Telecommunications Challenges in Developing Countries' addresses an important aspect of interconnection - the settings of call termination charges. In rural telecommunications, network costs are known to be high. The traditional consensus has been that many rural areas cannot be connected without subsidies. This paper investigates the possibilities for implementing a geographically de-averaged charge regime indicative of the relative cost differences between urban and rural networks. This could change the business model for rural networks, significantly increasing revenues from incoming calls. The study investigates historic and current examples of asymmetric charges and user tariffs in fixed-to-mobile interconnection regimes today. It addresses a wide range of related issues and questions, including: - Customer affordability - Customer education and awareness - Numbering plan and billing - Whether detailed cost models would be required, and - Whether asymmetric termination charges, while eliminating current market distortions, would create other distortions. Alternative implementation strategies are also considered, with an eye to practicality for developing countries. It concludes that the concept is feasible, and the study further provides ideas for piloting the concept in a limited number of countries.

The liberalization of the telecommunications markets in Sub-Saharan Africa led to increased competition on the provision and pricing of communication services. But, due to the lack of appropriate regulatory tools, newly established regulators are poorly equipped to arbitrate increasing interconnection disputes between competing operators. This guidebook and its associated CD-ROM, including the cost model, were prepared to provide Sub-Saharan Africa regulators and operators with a sound regulatory tool allowing the determination of accurate interconnection costs, thus facilitating the settlement of lengthy and costly interconnection disputes between fixed and mobile operators. The cost model belongs to the family of 'Bottom-Up' models, which calculate interconnection cost incurred by an efficient operator using the Long Run Incremental Cost (LRIC) methodology. The proposed cost model takes into account most features characterizing the development stage of telecommunications networks in Sub-Saharan Africa (small size of fixed network, importance of rural telephony, excessive reliance on microwave technology, explosive demand for mobile service, and weak regulatory capacity). 'A Model for Calculating Interconnection Costs in Telecommunications' offers telecom regulators and operators not only a decision support tool but also a stimulant to enhance an understanding of the logic of regulating a sector open to competition.

Over the last several years, the value of stocks in both the airline and the telecommunications industries have dropped catastrophically. Since these industries were among the most important -and most visible -to have been unleashed from regulation in recent decades (albeit in widely differing degree), their difficulties have raised the question of whether their deregulation should be reconsidered or even reversed. Alfred E. Kahn, one of the foremost authorities on deregulation, argues in this book that every passing year demonstrates the superiority of the road chosen for the airlines. He contrasts the financial meltdowns of both the airline and telecommunications industries with others taking place at the same time, particularly in technology-related stocks and ""dot.coms,"" pointing out that these sectors were also relatively free of direct economic regulation. Their experience provides a useful counter to the natural tendency to blame all the woes of aviation and telecommunications on government policy. This book provides a valuable and accessible guide to unraveling the complex world of network deregulation. It will serve as a reference point for practioners and policymakers, as well as an important introduction for the general public.

Recent advances in technology, combined with the deregulation of the telecommunication market and the proliferation of the Internet, have created a highly competitive environment for communication service providers. There is no simple recipe for pricing network service contracts in all contexts. Pricing is a complex subject, which depends on parameters of the actual market - including the degree of competition and customer demand - and parameters of technology, such as resource consumption, network architecture, resource availability, and cost.

Pricing Communication Networks: Economics, Technology and Modelling covers many important issues in providing new services, the relation between pricing and resource allocation in networks, and the emergence of the Internet and its pricing. It provides a framework of mathematical models for pricing multidimensional contracts with quality of service guarantees, and includes a useful background on network services and contracts, network technology, basic economics, and pricing strategy.

• Provides a broad overview of network services and contracts.

• Includes a primer on modern network technology and the economic concepts relevant to pricing and competition.

• Discusses mathematical models for multiplexing bursty traffic flows, and applies these to measuring network capability and deriving pricing strategies for services with statistical quality guarantees.

• Discusses definitions of cost for communication networks and explains the intricacies of cost-based pricing.

• Explains congestion pricing and its potential applications in the Internet.

• Illustrated throughout by detailed examples and figures.

• Includes coverage of specialist topics, such as regulation, multicasting, interconnection, and auctions.

Pricing Communication Networks: Economics, Technology and Modelling is an essential reference for graduate students, researchers and practitioners from electrical engineering, computer science, economics and operations research. It can be used by economists to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of network services and technology and by engineers and operational researchers to gain the background in the economics that is required to understand how to price communication networks effectively.