ABSTRACT

The teleport concept emerged in the early 1980s as a strategy for aggregating telecommunications traffic and transmission facilities for an entire city or metropolitan area. Teleports were positioned to provide global connectivity to regional and metropolitan fiber optic distribution networks. The economics of high-speed, international telecommunications in the early 1980s, when the teleport concept first emerged, were characterized by extremely high fixed costs-satellite ground stations, in particular. As Hanneman explained:

A teleport is analogous to an airport in many respects. Airports function as air travel centers where costly resources, such as runways and control towers, are shared among all of the air carriers within a given geographic region. Airports are surrounded by a protected airspace, which is kept free of obstructions that could disrupt operations. Travelers have access to multiple carriers at one central location. Aside from efficiently serving the needs of both providers and users of services, land use is maximized for the purpose of air travel (Hanneman 1985:6).