The telecommunications industry is at the forefront of the information age-delivering voice, data, graphics and video at ever increasing speeds and in an increasing number of ways.

Where as wire line telephone communication was once the primary service of the industry, wireless communication services and cable and satellite program distribution make up an increasing share of the industry.

During the late 1990s, the telecommunications industry, experienced very rapid growth and massive investment in transmission capacity.

Eventually this caused supply to significantly exceed demand, resulting in much lower prices for transmission capacity. The excess capacity and additional competition led to either declining revenues or slowing revenue growth, which has led to consolidation within the industry, as many companies merged or left the industry.

The largest sector of the telecommunications industry continues to be made up of wired telecommunications carriers. Establishments in this sector mainly provide telephone service via wires and cables that connect customers' premises to central offices maintained by telecommunications companies.

The central offices contain switching equipment that routes content to its final destination or to another switching center that determines the most efficient route for the content to take.

While voice used to be the main type of data transmitted over the wires, wired telecommunications service now includes the transmission of all types of graphic, video, and electronic data mainly over the Internet.

These new services have been made possible through the use of digital technologies that provide much more efficient use of the telecommunications networks.

One major technology breaks digital signals into packets during transmission. Networks of computerized switching equipment, called packet switched networks, route the packets. Packets may take separate paths to their destination and may share the paths with packets from other users.

At the destination, the packets are reassembled, and the transmission is complete. Because packet switching considers alternate routes, and allows multiple transmissions to share the same route, it results in a more efficient use of telecommunications capacity as packets are routed along less congested routes...