 function, was and still is, a phone call. The line was in use or it was free. It could be used or one had to wait. One person could talk to one person at a time (until party lines were figured out). One operator could connect two parties to make conversation, later capitalized by the industry in the form of a telephone call. Almon B. Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker, invented the stepping switch to allow customers to decide between his establishment and a competitor without undue influence of the wife of his competitor who just happened to be the local telephone operator. The stepping switch enabled the industry to continue in a mechanized and auto- mated fashion, without operators, one telephone call at a time, the staple of long distance telephone bills. Audio-the staple of radio-was analog and stayed that way. In 2003, radio broadcasters began upgrading transmission facilities to digital transmission. Video might be characterized as digital in nature-at the very least it's highly structured. Pioneer inventors Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin both conceived a fixed, repetitive scan structure. Farns- worth reportedly conceived his version while plowing successive rows in a field. 2 INTERNET AND TELECOM: A BRIEF HISTORY Historically, telephony, radio, and television share a common busi- ness life-cycle behavior. Still in relative infancy, the Internet seems to be evolving in similar fashion. The life-cycle includes three distinct phases starting with experimentation, moving into growth and con- solidation, and finally into a mature state where the technology continues to evolve and the business segment makes a continuing contribution to the economy over a long time. EXPERIMENTATION Experimentation is at the root of technological success. Technological success forges reality from fantasy or the fantasy remains just that- an idea with little or no value other than personal satisfaction. Experimentation with telephony and radio proceeded almost in par- allel. Bell's invention of the telephone took place aro