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This chapter champions the punctuated equilibrium framework of evolutionary biology as an alternative approach toward explaining technological change. It argues that the critical event is not a transformation of the technology, but speciation — the application of existing technology to a new domain of application. As a result of the distinct selection criteria and the degree of resource abundance in the new domain, a new technological form may emerge. This new technological form may be able to penetrate other niches and, in particular, may precipitate a process of ‘creative destruction’ and out-compete prior technologies. This framework is applied to an historical study of wireless communication, from the early experimental efforts of Hertz to the modern development of wireless telephony.

This chapter presents a history and analysis of wireless spectrum auctions, one of the most blatant examples of companies paying far more for an asset than any conceivable market or strategic value. Most telecommunications companies, whether large or small, framed the issue of needing the option of becoming a wireless player. Thus, despite all efforts at estimating the value of the spectrum rationally, companies try to outbid each other to obtain the spectrum licenses. Telecommunications companies took on a high debt load to finance their purchases making it impossible for them to invest in networks to offer new services. Their auction victories contributed to the decline of economic activity and the lowering of stock prices.

This chapter describes the application of information technology in the daily work of the telecommunications industry, beginning with the introduction of digital technologies, moving on to a review of business applications, and then to services that have been highly digitized and automated. The role of the Internet and wireless communications is discussed.

This chapter examines telecommunications development in Macau. The telecommunications infrastructure was built under the monopoly of CTM (Companhia de Telecomunicações de Macau) — a joint venture between Cable and Wireless, Portugal Telecom International, CITIC Pacific, and the Macau SAR government. The monopoly was partially ended in 1999 when the twenty-year build-operate-transfer franchise, granted in 1981, was extended to 2011, but only for fixed line and international gateway services. Competition with CTM's GSM 900/1800 MHz mobile services was introduced in 2001 when Hutchison and SmarTone from Hong Kong were licensed to operate GSM.

This concluding chapter identifies some of the emerging concepts and technologies that will drive future advances in polar limnology. These include the increased awareness of climate and related impacts in the polar regions, and the importance of high latitude lakes and rivers as sentinels of global change; the increased availability of wireless network technology to obtain high temporal resolution data sets from these remote sites; the emergence of new sensor technologies and underwater platforms, including robotic systems that may be used in the future to explore subglacial lakes and other polar waters; and the development of surface imagery approaches ranging from local-scale observations by unmanned aerial vehicles to circumpolar-scale measurements by satellite, for example by synthetic aperture radar. The chapter also examines the new opportunities provided by environmental genomics, including application towards bioprospecting for novel extremophiles and biomolecules of pharmaceutical and industrial interest.

This chapter focuses on the prophecies and discoveries in wireless communication. It discusses Heinrich Rudolf Hertz's experimental demonstration of the creation and communication of electromagnetic waves and James Clerk-Maxwell's presentation of proof that the creation and communication of such electromagnetic waves is possible. It discusses Guglielmo Marconi's filing of his wireless patent in London, England in 1896. His invention consisted of a sensitive tube-like receiver connected to an earth and an elevated aerial, which paved the way for the development of wireless telephony.

Sir Roderick Jones ran Reuters as an autocracy. This had been his style in South Africa, and it was still more his style as head of Reuters between the wars. Between the wars, Reuters encountered increasing difficulty in protecting its position throughout the world. In particular, it found the challenge of the thrusting American news agencies hard to meet. The weakening position of Reuters in the world mirrored the weakening position of the British Empire itself. The British government did not depend solely upon Reuters for circulating favourable news and comment. The Foreign Office decided in 1919 to continue the British Official News Service, which had been started during the war, which was later known as the British Official Wireless. Later in the 1930s, Reuters prided itself upon receiving or sending news by teleprinter across the world in a matter of minutes.

Hugh Lloyd-Jones was an eminent Latin scholar who, during the Second World War, learnt Japanese and was posted to the Wireless Experimental Centre near Delhi. He became Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1966. Obituary by Nigel Wilson FBA.

Just as queueing theory revolutionized the study of circuit switched telephony in the twentieth century, stochastic geometry is gradually becoming a necessary theoretical tool for modelling and analysis of modern telecommunications systems, in which spatial arrangement is typically a crucial consideration in their performance evaluation, optimization or future development. In this survey we aim to summarize the main stochastic geometry models and tools currently used in studying modern telecommunications. We outline specifics of wired, wireless fixed and ad hoc systems and show how stochastic geometry modelling helps in their analysis and optimization. Point and line processes, Palm theory, shot‐noise processes, random tessellations, Boolean models, percolation, random graphs and networks, spatial statistics and optimization: this is a far from exhaustive list of techniques used in studying contemporary telecommunications systems and which we shall briefly discuss.

A rapid succession of technical advances laid the foundations for massive dissemination of information and created new forms of communication. The former innovations included automated typesetting (linotypes) and typewriting, chemical processes for papermaking based on wood pulp, affordable photographic cameras, convenient films, movies, and sound recordings. New means of communication included telephones and the epochal discovery of Hertzian waves that were soon used for the first wireless broadcasts and later developed into the still expanding universe of electronic devices.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this volume, which is about the first four years in the history of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) from 1922 to 1926. This volume discusses the formation of the BBC after tough commercial bargaining, first between competitive wireless interests, and then between the wireless interests as a whole and the British General Post Office (GPO). It provides background information on the discovery and invention of wireless communication and describes the challenges faced by BBC in its early years in Great Britain.

This chapter examines the transition in the application of wireless communication from radio-telephony to broadcasting. It highlights the role of World War I in harnessing the new powers of wireless to the needs of the separate armies, navies, and intelligence services. It explains that it was during this time that the long association between radio and propaganda had begun. It describes the Marconi Company's experimental broadcasts in Chelmsford and explains the role of the Post Office in these broadcasts.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of wireless amateurs and broadcasting professionals in Great Britain in 1920. It argues that the enthusiasm of the amateurs filed the gap between the cessation of the Marconi Company's experiments and the authorization of short regular broadcast programmes of words and music in January 1922. It explains that the Postmaster-General rescinded his veto on broadcasting after receiving a petition signed by representatives of sixty-three wireless societies with more than 3,000 members. After the decision of the Postmaster-General, the Marconi Company was able to launch its first broad on February 14, 1922 in Writtle, which served as the nucleus of the brain trusts of the technical side of British broadcasting.

This chapter focuses on the boom of the broadcasting sector in the U.S. It discusses American visitor P.F. Godley's address to the Wireless Society of London in which he described broadcasting developments in the U.S. and criticised the attitude of the British Post Office towards broadcasting. It highlights the eventual impact of the broadcasting pattern that developed in the U.S. on the sequence of events of Great Britain. It also discusses the work of the Radio Corporation of America.

This chapter explores the role of the British Post Office in the formation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It explains that F.J. Brown was the Post Office official directly concerned with the organisation of broadcasting and that the legal power of the Postmaster-General to concern himself with broadcasting derived from two pieces of legislation. These were the 1869 Telegraph Act and the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act. It discusses the Post Office's recognition of the importance of the commercial interests in the future of broadcasting.

Wireless technologies extend a firm’s transactions from a stationary space to a mobile space. Transactions and communications that take place in the mobile space, i.e. wireless Internet infrastructure, are defined as m-business. This chapter discusses how m-business services generate new business value. It presents a case study on Japan’s NTT DoCoMo i-mode, which introduced a new suite of multimedia services, new forms of connecting buyers and sellers to markets, and new incentives for customers to cocreate value.

This chapter examines the role of wireless networking in business enterprises. It discusses the rapid growth of wireless devices and technologies and the different categories of wireless networking applications emerging in practice. It argues that unless information technology managers face a set of key issues today, they will encounter difficult strategic challenges in the future.