On the Role of Telecommunications in the Development of Nations

Both in developed and developing nations there is a clear need to discriminate among all the numerous choices of telecommunications technologies and services that have been, are, or can be developed. This discrimination should be based on a knowledge of the likely effects of each of those services on the community and its environment; discrimination can no longer be left open to the sole forces of the market and it is within the engineering function to provide value judgments on the technologies it produces. In developing nations where there is a strong shortage of capital, the telecommunication planner´s problem is not one of satisfying demand indiscriminately at fair prices ensuring a reasonable financial return to the firm but rather to find a strategy of service growth that will be optimal for the country or parts thereof. The comparison of alternative investment plans in the telecommuncations sector should proceed, therefore, attending to the measure in which each one can contribute towards these general objectives. Inasmuch as progress towards the different national targets is unlikely to allow for a single measure common to all of them, investment plans that are optimal with regard to different targets will also not be comparable with one another and the choice between optimal plans escapes the sector and becomes a matter of subjective national policy. Telecommunication planners should be able to find such optimal strategies and to supply global planners with elements of judgment suitable to support the decision of allocation of resources to the telecommunication sector. A review of published material in this field shows that progress towards such a situation has been very small. The paper then discusses some ideas on how the study of interaction between telecommunications and society could be advanced within a frame of reference given by current knowledge in the social sciences and in telecommunication technology.