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UNIVERSAL SERVICE: MIGRATION OF METAPHORS

-- Harmeet Sawhney & Krishna Jayakar

Abstract

In this paper,we argue that universal service for advanced
telecommunications will not emerge out of a grand design or new
definition, but instead out of an intensely contested incremental
process. New services will be added layer-by-layer to the universal
service package, which will not be entirely consistent across the nation.
We conceptualize that this process involves three modes of network
expansion--territorial, demographic and layered.

Territorial expansion is the extension or replication of systems across
geographical space over a period of time. Demographic expansion takes
place within populations and expands the definition of "in-groups"
participating in a system to include progressively larger sections of the
population over a period of time. Layered expansion is the asynchronous
addition of a hierarchy of complementary innovations to existing systems
by which they are continuously modified and made more complex.

Three metaphors -- the telegraph, universal suffrage, and universal
education -- embody the logic of network expansion in the territorial,
demographic and layered modes. As the telephone network evolved, it
passed through these three modes of expansion. Naturally, the metaphoric
terms in which we thought about the network also changed to reflect the
dominant processes in the different stages of its expansion. The
telegraph metaphor, which was adequate to understand territorial
expansion in the early phase of the telephone network, was replaced by
the universal service principle, derived in part from the universal
suffrage metaphor, when demographic expansion became the dominant mode of
network expansion. But the universal suffrage metaphor,which has a
definite closure -- one person, one vote -- is unable to tackle the open
endedness of a multiple services environment.

As layered expansion becomes the dominant process in the evolution of the
telephone network, we suggest that the universal education metaphor is
more appropriate. The question of universal education never had a
closure, as it dealt with a continually evolving phenomenon. The
definition of universal education gradually expanded from elementary
school to middle school to high school and even touched on higher
education. How were universal education policies developed for a
"service" that had no well defined boundaries? We draw on this
experience with universal education to formulate broad principles for our
current efforts to develop universal service policies in advanced
telecommunications.



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"Those who take pride in an orderly desk will never know the
joy of finding something they thought was irretrievably lost."

Krishna P. Jayakar Home:
Department of Telecommunications, E 218, Bicknell Apartments,
Indiana University, Bloomington, Bloomington, IN 47406.
IN 47401. Phone: (812) 855-2017 Phone: (812) 857-0186
email: kjayakar@indiana.edu
web-page: http://silver.ucs.indiana.edu/~kjayakar/home.html
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