ABSTRACT
Telecommunications is an old industry which is currently experiencing very dramatic change as a result of rapid developments in technology (“technology push”), new patterns of consumer demand (“demand pull”) and the internationalisation of the markets themselves. At the heart of the upheaval are the diffusion of computers, the resultant demand for new data transmission facilities, the application of computer technology to telecommunications and, more generally, no less than the dramatic and wholesale technological “convergence” of the data processing and communications sectors. As a consequence of technological advance, the scope of telecommunications has expanded from that of the “plain old telephone service” to include a proliferation of new transmission methods and services - for which the term “tele-matics” has been coined.
