How have networked telecommunications affected global industry?
Telecommunications is an essential infrastructure, indispensable for many other industries. In the early days of industrialization the location of industries was intimately tied to the availability of raw materials and access to cheap forms of transport, such as water transport, railways, etc. With the development of information technology, physical location or geographical distance have largely lost their critical value. Companies are able to locate their subsidiaries at different points of the globe producing components in the most efficient centres and sending them for assembly to other centres which are closest to the market. Such a worldwide distribution of production centres has been made possible by real-time enterprise networks which allow quality control, maintenance of optimal level of inventory, and design and quantity change according to market demand. The most dramatic development has been the creation and rapid expansion of a superstructure of value added computer network
