Introduction

I appreciate the opportunity to speak before your Organizational Communications and Information Systems Consortium. I have entitled my remarks "Telecommunications Policy Issues From and Engineering Perspective," and I will break them up into three parts. First, I will very quickly review the development of competition in the telecommunications field from an engineering standpoint. I will then set forth what I believe are the five most important policy issues related to those developments. Finally, I will offer some concluding notes on what I have presented. I should warn you in advance that in setting forth what I believe to be the most important issues I will, in some cases at least, suggest my own views on how those issues might best be resolved. By doing so, I hope to stimulate the discussions that are scheduled to occur in the breakout sessions later this morning.