Today U.S. telecommunications infrastructure has little fiber to the premises, although fiber makes up most long-haul and metropolitan area networks. Realizing the goal of fiber everywhere involves a number of problems requiring research. For example, while the cost of optical components is not a significant problem in core networks because the cost is spread across many users, the components represent a nontrivial expense for local access networks, which serve only one user or a handful of…

Use of COTS products is often highly desirable as a means of reducing the cost of infrastructure, yet such products bring concerns as well (see the discussion below in the section “Leadership for National Defense and Homeland Security”). For example, military requirements can exceed what COTS products alone can deliver, perhaps because the demands (e.g., the need for multilevel security) are higher or the application environment is different, because of the presence of an adversary, for…

CableLabs helped foster the introduction of digital transmission and the hybrid fiber co-axial cable architecture found in modern cable systems and developed a series of specifications for cable modems known as the Data Over Cable System Interface Specification.

Physical connectivity is the foundation for telecommunications networks. Imagine that the United States had never deployed copper wires and coaxial cable to connect its homes and businesses and now wanted to design the best…

In 2004, NSF announced a new $40 million per year program called Network Technology and Systems (NeTS), which represents a significant new investment in telecommunications research and education projects and will focus on the following four areas: programmable wireless networks, networking of sensor systems, networking broadly defined, and future Internet design.20 The program has latitude for interdisciplinary work that could also involve physical devices and could suggest a wide range of…

Within U.S. universities, there are multiple indications that much U.S. academic research in telecommunications is being carried out by foreign national graduate students. In the papers published in Globecom 2005, 459 of the 675 authors from U.S. universities (68 percent) have apparently Asian surnames. This observation is consistent with data showing that roughly 60 percent of the Ph.D.s in engineering and 50 percent of the Ph.D.s in computer science awarded in the United States are being…

An implication of defining telecommunications broadly is that every layer involved in communication at a distance becomes, at least partially, part of the telecommunications industry. The broad range and large number of companies that contribute to the telecommunications industry are evident in the following list of examples:

Networking service providers across the Internet and the PSTN, wireless carriers, and cable operators. Examples include AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and…

The telecommunications industry, which once consisted mainly of the telephone companies and their equipment vendors, has expanded greatly. It now includes a broad set of service providers, including telephone companies, cable operators, Internet service providers, and wireless carriers, as well as equipment vendors offering fiber-optic, cable, and wireless connections. Telecommunications comprises all the hardware and software for the telecommunications infrastructure and the applications…

Federal funding of long-term research has not increased to cover the decline in industry support. No systematic efforts, such as took place for the semiconductor industry with SEMATECH, have emerged. Because the benefits of much telecommunications research cannot be appropriated by individual firms, therefore, public funding of such research appears necessary.

Before the emergence of the Internet and other data networks, telecommunications had a clear meaning: the telephone (and…