【英文】兰德报告：数字基础设施和数字存在-评估对未来军事竞争和冲突影响的框架（122页）

英文研究报告 2022年11月01日 08:11 管理员

The first communication networks were terrestrial networks that connected companies; cities; towns; and, eventually, the vast majority of homes using the public telephone switch network. The first terrestrial telecommunications networks for voice were deployed in the United States and Britain in the 1880s and relied on the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 to transmit and receive voice calls. Eventually, one company developed a network capable of supporting reliable long-distance voice calls in the United States: American Telephone and Telegraph, whose corporate descendent is now known simply as AT&T. AT&T became a private monopoly corporation and was officially sanctioned as a private monopoly by court order in 1913, after agreeing to allow local phone companies to connect to its network.5 By 1915, the AT&T network had connected New York to San Francisco.

Overseas networks evolved differently, as government-owned monopoly companies were tasked to build out the national networks in different countries. In 1925, AT&T created its own research and development (R&D) laboratory, Bell Labs, which was responsible for many inventions and innovations important for the development of new computing and communication technologies. AT&T continued to dominate the U.S. telecom industry and, in 1984, was broken up in response to an antitrust lawsuit brought by the U.S. government. The core of AT&T remained in the parent company, the long-distance company, and its manufacturing arm, which made telephone and network equipment. However, the local regional networks, the so-called Baby Bells, were spawn spun off as separate corporate entities. In the breakup, AT&T retained Bell Labs. AT&T was no longer a monopoly in either the long-distance market, where Sprint and Microwave Communications Incorporated (MCI) emerged as competitors, or in the telephone equipment market, where a host of new companies emerged.