In short, what telecommunications does in concert with the microelectronics revolution is enable expertise to be applied more widely and directly to solving business problems:

The power of information technologies, which is the marriage of telecommunications

and computer technologies, is still incalculable. It has within itself the

ability to make the world a point rather than a sphere. The net result of this

technology is the increasing ability to get the right answer, the right information,

in the right hands precisely when you need it. This results, in turn, in the

increasing ability in whatever field of endeavor to be not only quick but also

correct. This technology will affect industries in very subtle ways. It will

determine who are the winners and who are the losers, based upon their ability

to integrate with the changes that will be brought by information technologies.

Concern for the present and promise for the future revolved around data storage, data compression, and, most of all, bandwidth, the number of bits that can be transmitted at one time through a medium. The development of a number of alternative transmission technologies was also mentioned as an area where present efforts are somewhat constrained by not knowing what the future will bring in areas such as Radio Frequency, fiber optics, and laser communications.  The general view was that wireless communications was unlikely to provide the foundation of the system-of-the-future as had once been thought.