cyberspaces

This page looks at some of the 'internet infrastructure' companies and offers pointers to studies of telecommunication networks in general.

It covers -

• introduction
• the web and the net
• fibre optics, copper & wireless
• geopolitics
• Australia, New Zealand and Canada
• precursors such as Minitel and Teletext
• US and UK telcos
• LANS and WANS

     introduction

What is the internet? One writer suggested that the

Internet itself is not one single medium but an agglomerate of different methods and technologies working to create what can be considered a hyper-media, or a channel used by many other media to transmit messages or simulated the most diverse communication processes.

Another, in the Journal of International Cultural Studies, drew on metaphors in arguing that -

Internet can be considered the newspaper without the press and paper, the Television without the TV set, the radio without waves, and the face-to-face interaction without the 'real' and physical encounter between two or more parts. Internet is its own thesis and antithesis, without fully presenting a synthesis, as the Hegelian dialectic would expect. The synthesis is only reached by the direct intervention of the social actor 'the audience' and it will produce not just one final outcome but diverse results according to different inputs and stimulus. Take for instance the use of electronic mail (e-mail). It communicates something, what can be concretely represented by a written message between two or more people. The same message could also be transmitted by other method such as an online discussion board, however the e-mail and the discussion board methods would have totally different outputs for the same transmitted message, including privacy issues, response time, objectivity, context, etc.

The US Federal Networking Council in 1995 defined the net as

the global information system that --
(i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons;
(ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
(TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and
(iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.

     the web and the net

Siegfried Kracauer commented almost a century ago that "Each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of communications while obstructing others".

     fibre optics, copper and wireless

For fibre optics the outstanding study is Jeff Hecht's City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1999).

Davis Dyer & Daniel Gross collaborated on Generations of Corning : The Life and Times of an American Corporation 1851-2001 (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2001), an official history like Corning & the Craft of Innovation (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2001) by Margaret Graham & Alec Shuldiner. Winning in High-Tech Markets: The Role of General Management: How Motorola, Corning & General Electric Have Built Global Leadership Through Technology (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1993) by Joseph Morone has less depth.

Global Connections: International Telecommunications Infrastructure & Policy (New York: Wiley 1997) by Heather Hudson is a lucid introduction to the global pipelines - the cables, microwave, satellite and other links. An overview of Australian and New Zealand telecommunications history, markets and infrastructures is here.

Our Network & GII guide points to other sources, such as Robert Heldman's The Telecommunications Information Millennium (New York: McGraw-Hill 1995) and Globalisation, Technology & Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1993) by Stephen Bradley, Jerry Hausman & Richard Nolan.

For wireless in the US see James Murray's On the Line: The Inside Story of the Greed, Gambling & Gall that Shaped America’s Cell Phone Industry (New York: Perseus 2001).

     geopolitics

Three historical perspectives are provided in Peter Hughill's Global Communications Since 1844: Geopolitics & Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1999), The Carrier Wave: New Information Technology & the Geography of Innovation, 1846-2003 (London: Unwin Hyman 1988) by Peter Hall & Paschal Preston, and Brian Winston's excellent Media Technology & Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge 1999). 

Frances Cairncross' upbeat The Death of Distance (London: Orion 1997) and Ithiel de Sola Pool - in Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge: Belknap 1987) and Technologies Without Boundaries (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1990) - place the 'Internet Revolution' in context and tease out some implications. 

Essays in The Global Political Economy of Communication: Hegemony, Telecommunications & the Information Economy (New York: St Martin's 1994) edited by Edward Comer note that the web and satellite broadcasting are the latest iterations of traditional communication conflicts. 

Technology has promised the abolition of distance and the globalisation of everyday life. Twice before - in 1865 with the creation of the International Telegraph Union and in 1906 with the creation of the Radiotelegraphy Union - international agreement to encourage and then to regulate new international communication technologies have marked the beginning of generation-long conflicts over the boundaries of new, larger (but certainly less-than-global) economic orders.

     Australia, New Zealand and Canada

This site features a separate, more detailed profile on the Auistralian telecommunications infrastructure, industry and regulation.

For Australia consult Ann Moyal's exemplary Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications (Melbourne: Nelson 1984). Edgar Harcourt's Taming The Tyrant: The First 100 Years of Australia's International Telecommunications Service (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1987) and Kevin Livingstone's The Wired Nation Continent: The Communication Revolution & Federating Australia (Melbourne: Oxford Uni Press 1996) are drier. Bruce Arnold's forthcoming Copper & Gold: Colonial Telecommunications Economics Before 1901 considers investment, costs, revenue and traffic in Australasia and other regions, providing a perspective on claims that fibre to every Australian household would cost $30 billion.

For New Zealand Alex Wilson's Wire & Wireless: A History of Telecommunications in New Zealand 1860-1987 (Palmerston: Dunmore Press 1994) is serviceable.

Robert Babe's Telecommunications in Canada: Technology, Industry & Government (Toronto: Uni of Toronto Press 1990) is complemented by Dwayne Winseck's paper A Social History of Canadian Telecommunications

     precursors

The Communications Revolutions profile on this site points to economic and historical studies of pre-internet communication networks and their impacts.

They include Carolyn Marvin's exemplary When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communications in the Late 19th Century (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1990), Laura Otis' Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: Uni of Michigan Press 2001), William Dutton's Information & Communication Technologies: Visions & Realities (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1996) and Ian Hutchby's Conversation & Technology : From the Telephone to the Internet (London: Polity 2001).

Ithiel de Sola Pool's Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment (Norwood: Ablex 1983) is a useful point of reference for assessing forecasts about e-commerce, WAP and other developments and more generally for myths about cyberspace.

Leonard Graziplene's Teletext: Its Promise & Demise (Bethlehem: LeHigh Uni Press 2000) looks at a revolution that didn't arrive. For France's Minitel we recommend Jack Kessler's 1995 D-Lib paper and the 1998 OECD Information Economy Working Party's report (PDF) on France's Experience With The Minitel: Lessons For Electronic Commerce Over the Internet rather than Marie Marchand's A French Success Story: The Minitel Saga (Paris: Larousse 1988).

     US and UK telcos

Alan Stone's How America Got On-Line: Politics, Markets & the Revolution in Telecommunications (Armonk: Sharpe 1997), Electronic Media & Government: The Regulation of Wireless & Wired Mass Communication in the United States (White Plains: Longman 1995) by Leslie Smith & Milan Meeske, Telecommunication Policy for the Information Age: From Monopoly to Competition (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1994) by Gerald Brock and The Fall of the Bell System (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1988) by Peter Temin offer insights into regulatory and market changes in the US. 

Neil Wasserman's From Invention to Innovation: Long-Distance Telephone Transmission at the Turn of the Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1985) is a cogent study of innovation and economics. 

George David Smith's The Anatomy of a Business Strategy: Bell, Western Electric & the Origins of the American Telephone Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1985), Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western Electric (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999) by Stephen Adams & Orville Butler and Robert Garnet's The Telephone Enterprise: The Evolution of the Bell System’s Horizontal Structure 1876-1909 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1985) are more specialised.

There are other pointers in the Communications Revolutions profile.

     LANS and WANS 

Lawrence Roberts' Caspian Networks (profiled here) aims to be that giant-killer. Urs von Burg's The Triumph of Ethernet: Technological Communities & the Battle for the LAN Standard (Stanford: Stanford Uni Press 2001) is an exemplary account of standard-setting processes, economics and businesses.

 


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