The Technological and Learning Regimes

The demise of the Old Telecoms Industry began in the mid-1980s when, due to different combinations of political-economic circumstances, the monopoly of telecoms was ended in the US, UK and Japan. By the late1990s, with the agreement of the European Union to fully liberalise its telecoms markets and the similar agreement of the WTO, there was a widespread consensus that the liberalisation of telecoms is essential. The roots of change that gave birth to the New Telecoms Industry in the early1990s, however, as this chapter will show, were far more fundamental than the political and regulatory decisions that finally legitimised the changes. In the 1990s a new set of influences, that had begun thirty years earlier in an initially unrelated set of activities, brought about fundamental changes that further transformed the Telecoms Industry into the Info-communications Industry. These influences came from the Internet based on its triad of core technologies: packet-switching, Internet Protocol (IP), and the World Wide Web.