Cities and Their Vital Systems Infrastructure Past, Present, and Future (1988) / Chapter Skim
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11 Reflections on the Telecommunications Infrastructure
11 Reflections on the Telecommunications Infrastructure
Pages 249-257
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From page 249... ...
THE MARKET SHIFT Probably the most important environmental factor determining the future evolution of communications infrastructure in the United States is the shift from a regulated monopoly to market-driven competition (Borrus et al., 19841. Whereas the pace and direction of technological innovation were once determined mainly by systems engineering and the goal of expanding channel capacity and decreasing unit costs per bit, they are now driven by the needs and requirements of a few of the largest telecommunications users.
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From page 250... ...
This ideal was predicated on the assumption that there were what economists would call large positive externalities associated with the maximum dispersal of customer connections that could not be fully captured in the competitive price chargeable to the individual customer. This positive externality justified some kind of collective subsidy that actually took the form of a cross-subsidy from high-density traffic to lowdensity traffic, and from sophisticated high value-added services to minimal basic services.
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From page 251... ...
EFFECTS ON HUMAN SETTLEMENTS AND ORGANIZATIONS Will information power become more concentrated and less accessible to all, or will the abundance of information resources and channel capacity lead to greater equality of access to the power conferred by the control of information? Generally speaking, the various visions put forward in Japan of a future information society anticipate equalization of information power both regionally and among different groups of the population.
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From page 252... ...
Will telecommunications, possibly in combination with air transport, reinforce the hierarchy among urban centers ranging from world-scale economic and communications nerve centers to local niche cities, or will the abundance of information channels make possible many more centers with approximately equal connectedness to the world economy? The Japanese have attempted some answers to these questions: they see the new information society as decreasing the relative importance of such centers as Tokyo and Osaka, pointing to the characteristics of communications technologies that tend to make the cost of communication almost independent of distance (National Institute for Research Advancement' 19851.*
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From page 253... ...
The approach being developed by the Bundespost seems to be one of caution and indeed technological pessimism, although, as reported in Urban Innovation Abroad (1985) , "local governments in Germany are actively pushing their federal and state level counterparts for more active experimentation and deployment of telecom technologies," seeing "the technologies as helping to create a more democratic society where citizens have access to information from a variety of sources." Thus, there is a second thrust in the German approach emphasizing local influence in shaping the future of telecommunications technology in that country.
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From page 254... ...
The Japanese characteristically take an optimistic view and have adopted an aggressive attitude toward the creation of planned sophisticated networks in the expectation that they will lead to democratization of access to information services and a reduction in social differences arising from such differential access (National Institute for Research Advancement, 19851. Will modern information- and communications-intensive manufacturing and office technologies make possible dispersed, flexible specialization of the kind envisioned by Piore and Sabel in The Second Industrial Divide (19841?
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From page 255... ...
Will the trend toward smaller economic units promote the decentralization of labor-intensive components of an integrated production process to areas where the cost of labor is low, or will the trend toward just-in-time inventory management and the closer integration of design, production, and marketing tend to drive companies to repatriate economic activities that had previously been dispersed to take advantage of low labor costs (United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development, 1986; Society for International Development, 19851? As the fractional labor content of both goods and service production becomes so small that labor costs are no longer a major consideration in relation to inventory costs and the use of capital, will the attraction of cheap labor disappear?
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From page 256... ...
Indeed, the problem is that the life cycle of telecommunications technologies is shortening, and the proliferation of new technical opportunities is outfacing the ability of society to choose among them and to plan a coherent structure. The main problem for the United States is whether the new reliance on the market to determine the direction of innovation and infrastructure investment in telecommunications will serve the public interest more effectively than the old system of regulated monopoly, systems engineering, and technical integration.
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From page 257... ...
1985. Impacts of new telecommunications technologies on local governments in Europe, Japan and the U.S.
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