Background Industry 20 %
The telecommunications industry, which consists of the telephone, computer, and cable TV industries, has its roots in the telephone industry.
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1875. Bell was a speech teacher who studied electricity as a hobby and wanted to develop a harmonic telegraph so that two or more telegraphic messages could be sent over a single wire simultaneously. By chance, the essential principles of the telephone were discovered.
The telephone earned praise when it was first demonstrated at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in June 1876. However it did not gain widespread support until 1877 when Bell gave a number of public demonstrations of his invention. By 1892, Chicago and New
For over a century, the telephone industry relied primarily on wires to transmit and receive sound. Cellular technology, which relies on low-powered radio transmissions rather than wire transmission, existed as far back as the 1930s. , when mobile radios were first used by law enforcement and fire fighting personnel. In 1982, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allowed non-telephone companies to receive cellular licenses, which allowed them to use specified radio frequencies, and by 1983, the first commercial cellular mobile telephone was
Its development level is high, with close accessibility to the infrastructure from nearly all inhabited parts of the island and for all of the population, with exceptions. As of 1998, there were almost 55 million phone lines in Singapore, close to 47 million of which also served other telecommunication devices like computers and facsimile machines. Underwater telephone cables have been laid that lead to Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.
As of March 2009, there are three cellular phone operators in Singapore serving more than 6.4 million cellular phones. As for internet facilities, as of 2009, there are four major internet service providers (ISPs) in Singapore. By February 2009, there were more than 4.8 million broadband users in Singapore. Howevever, due to the small market and possible market collusion, there have been rising concerns that various ISPs' telecommunication infrastructures being highly