The purpose of this project was to provide a comparative technological assessment of current and state of the art elec tronics communications systems employed by the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. Literature relevant to cellular telephone technology and applications is reviewed in this chapter.
As society, both domestic and international, has become more complex, communication has assumed an increasingly signif icant role. Historically, both procedural improvement and technological innovation have beem employed to enhance communi cation efficiency and effectiveness.
Telecommunications transmission technology blossomed over the past decade. The new technology created opportunities for major organizations to improve both the effectiveness and the efficiency of their communications.
Some technological innovations, such as fiber optics transmission, simply translate into improvements in the quality and speed of existing telecommunications media telephone ser vices, as an example. Other innovations, however, lead to the development of new telecommunications media. Satellite commun ications technology, for example, makes videoconferencing pos sible. Still other technologies provide a basis for the com plete transformation of a telecommunications medium. Cellular technology, alone, provides a basis for the transformation of a telephone system, by de linking a telephone communication sys tem from a cable connected network (Hall, 1990; Levine and Keller, 1988). The linking of cellular technology with satel lite technology releases cellular telecommunications systems from geographical constraints, permitting the development of both continental and global cellular telecommunications systems (Asker, 1990; Popular Science, 1990; Time, 1990).
Because a new means of telecommunications is made possible by technological innovation, however, does not automatically mean that a new telecommunications medium will be feasible for organiz...