Washington, D.C. -- Today, Secretary of Commerce William M. Daley and Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) Chair Janet Yellen announced the findings of the CEA report on the growth and competition in the telecommunications industry. The report documents the positive impact that the telecommunications industry has had on our nation's economy. The report also underscores the important role that President Clinton and Vice President Gore's National Information Infrastructure (NII) initiative played in promoting a telecommunications and information infrastructure that is competitive, based on private investment, and that benefits consumers.

"The report's findings show that the principles of the NII and the Telecommunications Act are working. By continuing to enforce these principles, we can -- and will -- continue to create the right climate for investment, so that all Americans will reap the benefits of high-speed networks, new products and services, and lower prices," said Secretary Daley.

This report describes developments in the U.S. telecommunications market since 1993. It presents an overview of growth of the industry as a whole; discusses key developments in the long-distance, local, wireless, and equipment sectors; and describes the dramatic rise in use of the Internet and the increasingly interdependent relationship between the information and telecommunications industries.

The goal of this report is not to examine the economic issues underlying specific regulatory proceedings, nor is the purpose to analyze whether particular refinements to current laws or regulations would be useful. It is instead to discuss overall trends and to assess the broad impact of the current regulatory framework. For example:

• The telecommunications sector has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs since 1993. The telephone services and equipment sectors, which long were areas of declining employment as technology increased productivity, are directly responsible for the net creation of approximately 200,000 new jobs in the past 5 years.
• Hundreds of new firms have entered all sectors of the industry, with the number of publicly held telecommunications companies alone nearly doubling in the past 5 years. New competitors have been responsible for much of the growth in the local, long-distance, wireless, and equipment sectors.
• New entrants and incumbent firms have collectively invested tens of billions of dollars in new facilities, services, and research and development, leading to increased network capacity, deployment of new technology, and the roll-out of advanced, high-speed communications services.