Telecommunications enables participation and development. Telecommunications plays an increasingly vital role in enabling the participation and development of people in communities and nations disadvantaged by geography, whether in rural areas in the United States or in developing nations in the global society and economy.

Telecommunications provides vital infrastructure for national security. From natural disaster recovery, to homeland security, to communication of vital intelligence, to continued military superiority, telecommunications plays a pivotal role. When the issue is countering an adversary, it is essential not only to preserve telecommunications capability, but also to have a superior capability. There are potential risks associated with a reliance on overseas sources for innovation, technologies, applications, and services.

It is difficult to predict the future impact of telecommunications technologies, services, and applications that have not yet been invented. For example, in the early days of research and development into the Internet in the late 1960s, who could have foreseen the full impact of the Internet’s widespread use today?
The structure of the U.S. telecommunications industry has changed dramatically over recent decades, with consequences for research. Major changes over the past several decades have included the breakup of the Bell System, especially the 1984 divestiture, the 1995 creation of Lucent Technologies, and the advent of long-haul competitors such as MCI and Sprint; the transformation of cable system operators into telecommunications providers as they adopted the hybrid fiber/coaxial cable digital architecture, which supports digital, high-capacity, two-way communications; the development and mainstream adoption of the Internet, including the rise of a whole new class of industry players (e.g., Cisco, Microsoft, Google, and so on); and the creation and growth of a competitive wireless services market resulting in broad penetration of cellular voice and data services.

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