The Internet has great difficulty coping with the sharp increase in mobile devices like cellphones and laptops, and handling bandwidth-hungry traffic such as video, now demanded by an increasing number of users. According to Ellen W. Zegura, chairwoman of computer sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Internet is like a big…

This Office of Technology Assessment report on the current state of research and development in the telecommunications industry in the United States examines four specific areas of research as case studies: computer architecture, artificial intelligence, fiber optics, and software engineering. It discusses the structure and orientation of some…