The possible development of telecommunications and its effects on the telecommunications industry

Abstract The lowering of the cost of electronic technologies will not only result in a decrease of the costs of systems for traditional telecommunication services - seen relatively - but also in the opening up of new fields of application for such technologies. As the development of data processing in recent years has shown, this may lead to the coming into existence of new forms of telecommunication. In view of the technological development to be noted in the field of office technique, we may assume at present that text transmission will expand considerably in the future. Numerous and varied problems will result from this for the telecommunications industry. The demand for existing telecommunication services, in particular private telephone stations, will run along a higher level in the industrialized countries in the next few years than originally expected, so that the state of full development of the telephone network will be reached at an earlier date. For the national telecommunications industry this will necessitate the opening up of new markets. New forms of telecommunication in business are characterized by close relations between the processing of information and the transmission of information. On the one hand, this enlarges the range of the telecommunications industry but, on the other hand, it makes it necessary for the telecommunications administrations and the conventional telecommunications industry to develop the services they offer in conformity with the requirements of data and text processing.