О. В. Фёдорова е. В. Мезина е. В. Хамис английский язык в сфере информационных технологий и коммуникаций учебное пособие

Late in the nineteenth century communications facilities were augmented by a new invention – telephone. In the USA its use slowly expanded, and by 1900 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company controlled 855,000 telephones; but elsewhere the telephone made little headway until the twentieth century. After 1900, however, telephone installations extended much more rapidly in all the wealthier countries. The number of telephones in use in the world grew at almost 100 per cent per decade. But long-distance telephone services gradually developed and began to compete with telegraphic business. A greater contribution to long-range communication came with the development of wireless. Before the outbreak of the First World War wireless telegraphy was established as a means of regular communication with ships at sea, and provided a valuable supplement to existing telegraph lines and cables. In the next few years the telephone systems of all the chief countries were connected with each other by radio. Far more immediate was the influence that radio had through broadcasting and by television, which followed it at an interval of about twenty-five years.

Telephones are as much a form of infrastructure as roads or electricity, and competition will make them cheaper. Losses from lower prices will be countered by higher usage, and tax revenues will benefit from the faster economic growth that telephones bring about. Most important of all, by cutting out the need to install costly cables and microwave transmitters, the new telephones could be a boon to the remote and poor regions of the earth. Even today, half the world’s population lives more than two hours away from a telephone, and that is one reason why they find it hard to break out of their poverty. A farmer’s call for advice could save a whole crop; access to a handset could help a small rural business sell its wares. And in rich places with reasonable telephone systems already in place, the effect of new entrants – the replacement of bad, overpriced services with clever, cheaper ones – is less dramatic but still considerable.

Global phones are not going to deliver all these benefits at once, or easily. Indeed, if the market fails to develop, it could prove too small to support the costs of launching satellites. Still, that is a risk worth taking. And these new global telephones reflect a wider trend. Lots of other new communication services – on-line film libraries, personal computers that can send video-clips and sound-bites as easily as they can be used for writing letters, terrestrial mobile-telephone systems cheap enough to replace hard-wired family sets – are already technically possible. What they all need is deregulation. Then any of them could bring about changes just as unexpected and just as magical as anything that Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone has already achieved.