ABSTRACT
Incredibly, only fifteen years ago, telecommunications were virtually synonymous with one service-the basic telephone or Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). At this time, telecommunications meant, effectively, telephones with some minor flows of telexes, telegraphs and data communications (and, of course, the broadcasting services necessary for TV and radio). Between the nationalisation of the first telephone systems at the start of the twentieth century and the mid-1970s, all western nations except the United States maintained a state monopoly over their telecommunications networks through their Postal Telegraph and Telephone (PTT) authorities, who also ran national postal systems (see Figure 1.2). In the United States, AT&T operated a private monopoly in a similar fashion. These monopolies were maintained in order to roll out basic telephone systems, known as Public Switched Telecommunications Networks (or PSTNs) that were universally accessible within and between the cities of the national urban system. PSTNs were based on the use of analogue signals (where the voice was transmitted as an electrical wave that was its direct analogy), electromechanical telephone exchanges (which had physical moving parts to connect lines) and copper wires for transmitting signals. When high capacity was needed coaxial copper cable was laid; when only one telephone was to be linked up, a narrow, twisted-pair copper cable was strung to the house or office. During this period, the telephone was extended from an élite service for perhaps 15 per cent of the population to a service for the majority (60-75 per cent of the population). Telephone services were often seen to be a quasi-public good where a single, universal network was necessary because of the vast costs of developing a network through all parts of the nation state and the need for less affluent users and areas to gain access to the telephone.
