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Telcos have historically written some very successful technology. Unix from bell labs, Erlang from Ericsson to name two examples.
by ipython 5y ago
Telcos have historically written some very successful technology. Unix from bell labs, Erlang from Ericsson to name two examples.
- makapuf 5y agoWell telcos did led the pack worldwide regarding networking and mobile coms (GSM started as a French acronym), as said Unix, c and c++, many mobile concepts and services before Apple and Google replaced those.
- jsnell 5y agoFirst, Unix and Erlang are not good examples here. They were more like tiny research projects that escaped the lab. No particular economies of scale needed. In comparison to that, te technical artifacts these companies were actually aiming to produce (e.g. networking equipment) had hundreds of times more people working on them. Second, Ericsson is not a telco, they're a supplier. Exactly the kind of entity that can achieve economics of scale on building say a mobile gateway router or a billing system, by building one that can be used by a hundred telcos, not just one. Vertical integration did make more sense for the AT&T of old. The market didn't yet exist, or wasn't standardized enough, for them to be able to depend on that.