Taken, and edited, from: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/archive/index.php/t-11610.html

 

Here is some interesting trivia comparing telecommunication development between North American and Europe.

1830's or so-With the invention of the railway, transportation improved vastly. Given a rail line between two towns, one could move people and goods around faster and cheaper than what was possible before. In North America, the railway system was built and owned by private companies. The railway was not operated or owned by the government in any way. This is quite a bit different from Europe, where the railway was owned and operated by the state.

As commerce expanded, a fundamental problem developed. How can you send more than one train, in different directions, on the same line without having them crash into each other? This lead to signaling technology, where a copper cable was installed with all rail lines. This allowed operators at the stations to signal other towns when a train left.

1839-Soon after that some genius got the idea why not also send messages in Morse code? I could charge people per word to send a message. The telegraph was born. The first telegraphs were sent at rail stations and collected at rail stations.

This developed into a more solid telecom industry. More copper was installed, messages got cheaper, and so forth. The important thing to note here is that in North America the telecommunciations were controlled by private companies. Anyone that built rail lines also sold of telecom lines. This was different from Europe, where the government owned the rail lines and as a result the government also owned the telecom company.

Now read early years of the phone: http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi93.htm

Over time, the telecom industry exploded. AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) was formed, as well as other companies such as Worldcom, Sprint, MCI, Bell, and so on. In Europe, each country was stuck with its "<nation name> Telecom" as in "British Telecom," "France Telecom," "Deutche Telecom," and so forth.

In the 1960s, Bell Labs came up with the North American Numbering Plan system. It was a systematic way of numbering telephone numbers. It was very easy to use, very sensible, and was easy to implement into telecom switches. Bell become a very large company, and as a result of an antitrust case was split up into several companies: Pacific Bell, Southern Bell, Verizon, and so forth.

Today, there are tens of tier 1 telecom carriers, and hundreds of tier 2 carriers, in North America. Europe is slightly different, having had to deregulate the industry first. From the start companies were allowed to built their own infrastructure (in North America), but in Europe that only started recently. As a result, Europe lags North America substantially in the wireline telecom industry.

Next read: http://www.princeton.edu/~starr/articles/articles02/Starr-TelecomImplosion-9-02.htm