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In addition to emphasizing the impact of U.S. communications research on C4I (i.e., command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence2), it is also important to briefly note the relevance to C4I of the engineering disciplines. Much of the basic mathematics that underlies telecommunications engineering is also relevant to command and control systems. Almost any computing device depends heavily on communications technology, both internally to communicate between subelements of the computer and externally to communicate with other devices. And the field of intelligence is replete with examples of reliance on telecommunications. Hence, telecommunications research is significant for and integral to the capability and capacity of many aspects of the overall defense system.
A strong U.S. telecommunications research capability is also important for several indirect reasons related to defense and homeland security: Skill base of engineering talent: education and training. To solve the specialized communications issues in C4I requires that the United States have the best telecommunications engineers in the world, which in turn requires that a vibrant commercial industry be maintained. Otherwise, the best engineers will migrate to countries that have protected or low-cost businesses, and ultimately U.S. security will be put at risk.
Delivery capability of government suppliers. Because meeting military requirements depends on fundamental understanding of very-high-speed optical networks, satellite communications, and support of mobility in the battlefield, it is not sufficient to have a cadre of educated and trained individuals. Corporate environments must also be available in which such individuals are trained to work together in teams on system-level designs, and to take an interdisciplinary approach.
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Even with ATRA, NSF and DARPA will remain important contributors to U.S. telecommunications research efforts. The committee recommends that NSF and DARPA assess their investments in basic telecommunications research and consider increasing both their emphasis on and their level of investment in such research. Both should establish criteria for determining the appropriate level of telecommunications research funding. NSF should continue to strengthen its support for telecommunications research and should consider programs for attracting and developing young research talent. To stay at the forefront, DARPA should continue support of telecommunications research for military applications, even if there is the chance of commercial development of those technologies. In formulating its research programs, DARPA should also consider the telecommunications capabilities of potential adversaries and the risk of dependence on foreign suppliers for key technologies.
How important is telecommunications as an industry, and how important is telecommunications research to the overall health of that industry? Underlying these questions are several others. How important is telecommunications to the U.S. economy and society? To what extent are U.S. consumers likely to benefit directly from telecommunications research in terms of new products and services that enhance their lives or improve their effectiveness or productivity? How much scope for innovation is there left in telecommunications, or has telecommunications matured to the point that it is merely a commodity service or technology?
The core findings of this study—which are supported throughout this report—are that the telecommunications industry remains of crucial importance to the United States as a society, that a strong telecommunications research capability continues to be essential to the health and competitiveness of this U.S. industry internationally, and that the health of this industry strongly affects the U.S. economy in many ways.
Before the emergence of the Internet and other data networks, telecommunications had a clear meaning: the telephone (and earlier the telegraph) was an application of technology that allowed people to communicate at a distance by voice (and earlier by encoded electronic signals), and telephone service was provided by the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Much of the U.S. network was owned and operated by American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T); the rest consisted of smaller independent companies, including some served by GTE.
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As a result of the structural changes in the telecommunications industry, the source of funds for investing in research has shifted from the demand side—telephone customers who paid for Bell System research via a tax on telephony usage—to the vendors of equipment, software, and chips, although the U.S. military (through DARPA, the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force) continues to be a major source of investment in telecommunications research. Currently, end-user organizations and commercial intermediaries are investing very little in research (an exception is AT&T, which has maintained a vestige of Bell Labs but has cut that back substantially, due to dramatic reductions in traditional telecommunications revenues over the past 3 years, from a support level of close to $140 million in 2001 to a support level of below $60 million in 2004).
Today, for commercial technologies, most of the investment is made by supply-side equipment vendors and semiconductor and software companies. Service providers and equipment vendors primarily support research leading to near-term incremental additions to their own products and services, and are likely to keep the results of their short-term research programs proprietary in the interest of gaining competitive advantage.
Although demand-side entities are generally more likely to direct their research investments toward more fundamental and long-time-horizon opportunities, a major economic impediment to doing so is so-called free-riding. Since the goal of a demand-side entity is typically not to gain proprietary advantage, but to make innovative solutions available through the totality of its suppliers, demand-side investments in research usually benefit everybody, that is, all suppliers and other demand-side entities. Thus, companies or entities failing to invest in research can still benefit from the investments of others, and there is a temptation to gain a free ride on those investments—and a disincentive to invest in results that become largely a public good.
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The telecommunications industry is a major direct contributor to U.S. economic activity. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that just over 3 percent of the U.S. gross domestic income (GDI) in 2003 was from communications services (2.6 percent) and communications hardware (0.4 percent)—categories that are narrower than the broad definition of telecommunications offered above. At 3 percent, telecommunications thus represented more than a third of the total fraction of GDI spent on information technology (IT; 7.9 percent of GDI) in 2003. In fact, the fraction attributable to telecommunications is probably larger relative to that of IT than these figures suggest, given that much of the GDI from IT hardware (particularly semiconductors) could apply to any of several industries (computing, telecommunications, media, and electronics, for example). If one assumes IT to be the sum of computers (calculating), computers (wholesale), computers (retail), and software and services, the total GDI for IT is
$440 billion, compared to the total for telecommunications (communications hardware plus communications services) of $335 billion, making telecommunications’ contribution to GDI just under 80 percent of IT’s contribution to GDI.4
The telecommunications-related industries are also a major employer—communications services employed 1 million U.S. workers in 2002, representing 1.1 percent of the total private workforce, and communications equipment companies employed nearly 250,000 people.5 Moreover, telecommunications is a high-tech sector, with many highly skilled employees.
Telecommunications is a growth business. Although markedly reduced investment in some parts of the sector (following the bubble years of the late 1990s) may have given an impression of low growth in the long run, a longer-term view taking into account the need for humans and machines to communicate suggests that telecommunications will continue to grow apace, as evidenced by the ongoing expansion of wireless and broadband access services throughout the world.
Telecommunications is also a key enabler of productivity across the U.S. economy and society.6 Not only is telecommunications an industry in itself, but it also benefits nearly every other industry. In the 1990s the U.S. GDP grew rapidly, and the U.S. economy was among the strongest in the world. It is widely believed that the Internet economy played a significant role in this success.
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As supported by the horizontally homogeneous layered infrastructure, applications of various sorts increasingly incorporate telecommunications as only one capability among many. For example telephony, as it evolves into the Internet world, is beginning to offer a host of new data-based features and integrates other elements of collaboration (e.g., visual material or tools for collaborative authoring). Another important trend is machine-to-machine communication at a distance, and so it cannot be assumed that telecommunications applications exclusively involve people.
Like telecommunications itself, the telecommunications industry is broader than it was in the past. It encompasses multiple service providers, including telephone companies, cable system operators, Internet service providers, wireless carriers, and satellite operators. The industry today includes software-based applications with a communications emphasis and intermediate layers of software incorporated into end-to-end communication services. It also includes suppliers of telecommunications equipment and software products sold directly to consumers and also to service providers, as well as the telecommunications service providers
It includes companies selling components or intellectual property predominately of a communication flavor, including integrated circuit chip sets for cell phones and cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) modems.
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No longer a vertically integrated business, the telecommunications industry is enabled by a complex value chain that includes vendors, service providers, and users. The telecommunications value chain begins with building blocks such as semiconductor chips and software. These components are, in turn, incorporated into equipment and facilities that are purchased by service providers and users. The service providers then, in turn, build networks in order to sell telecommunications services to end users. The end users include individuals subscribing to services like telephony (landline and cellular) and broadband Internet access,
In terms of structure, the committee considered the pros and cons of different models and decided that a hybrid approach is best suited to the challenges facing the telecommunications industry. The committee envisions ATRA as a hybrid of activities of the sort historically associated with DARPA (which through the ARPANET program managed a research portfolio, developed a vision, and convened industry and academia) and SEMATECH (which brought a struggling high-tech sector together, initially with some federal support to complement industry dollars, to fund joint research, development, and roadmapping activities). ATRA would be staffed by program managers who would include researchers from both academia and industry. Industry funding would represent a significant fraction of total ATRA funding, and industry as well as academic researchers would be deeply involved in research activities.
There are a number of options for where within the federal government such a program could fit, each with its own set of tradeoffs. The committee does not make a specific recommendation for locating such a program but notes that ATRA’s proposed mission would align with that of existing agencies within the Department of Commerce and that NSF has developed mechanisms for joint academic-industry engineering research, albeit more focused and on a smaller scale.
ATRA’s multifaceted mission would include the following Identifying, coordinating, and funding telecommunications research for the nation. ATRA’s focus would be on critical telecommunications research in which the nation is currently underinvesting.
Fostering the conception, development, and implementation of major architectural advances. ATRA would place a priority on research that aims to make possible major architectural advances that result in the development of dramatically new telecommunications capabilities (such as the Internet was when it was developed) rather than incremental improvements to existing capabilities.
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The Bell System ended in 1983. Divestiture resulted in the separation of the local Bell System operating companies (which provided local telephone service to large regions of the United States) from the long-distance parts of the network (known as long-lines communications) and ended the license fee arrangement through which the regional operating companies supported Bell Labs. At the time of the separation, Western Electric (the equipment manufacturing part of the Bell System) was assigned to the part of the company that would be called AT&T), along with most of the research and development resources of Bell Labs. The regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs), the providers of local phone service, formed an R&D consortium called Bellcore (Bell Communications Research, later renamed Telcordia Technologies) and agreed to fund Bellcore to do the majority of the R&D needed to support them— at least for an initial period on the order of 5 to 7 years. Subsequently the RBOCs sold Bellcore to SAIC, causing the new lab to seek support outside the RBOCs and subsequently make radical changes in the scope and direction of its research program.
As a result of divestiture, the fundamental split in the Bell System propelled AT&T (and its R&D arm Bell Labs) into a competitive landscape for the first time, with aggressive competitors such as MCI and Sprint seeking to compete for long-distance services—for both residential and business customers. Thus although a tax on telecommunications revenue remained as a source for funding R&D at Bell Labs, the prospects for increased competition, lower telecommunications prices, and decreasing telecommunications revenues for AT&T, as well as the regulatory pressures to lose market share to new competitors, led to the beginning of the reduction in the long-term, unfettered, fundamental research done at Bell Labs. Additionally, divestiture marked the beginning of a process of transforming the telecommunications industry in the United States from a vertically organized structure (where one body, the Bell System, had control over every aspect of the telecommunications process, from components, to boards, to systems, to services, to operations) to a horizontally organized structure (where multiple competitors existed at every level of the hierarchy and where no single entity had full responsibility for the network architecture, end-to-end network operations, or long-term fundamental research that would enable the creation of an evolutionary path into the future).
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