Communing From Afar: Tracing the Telecoms Revolution

                                                                                         

Did you know that carrier pigeons count as a form telecommunications? This is because the 'tele' bit just means 'far' - so anything carrying communications over a long distance is a form of telecommunications.

What started with pigeons - in 776BC, to be precise, when a pigeon was used to carry news about who had won in the Olympic Games, which shows you how new being crazy about sports is - has ended up with mobile phones and the Internet. Or has it? Remember, all through time people using the latest technology - feathered or otherwise - thought that's how things had 'ended up'. But looking back, we know that wasn't the case. Things continued to develop and what the Victorians though was a miracle - railways and telegraphs - looks more than a bit clunky compared with air travel and Broadband Internet.
So it stands to reason that the telecommunications we marvel at in the present won't be so marvellous to coming generations. With this in mind, let's take a look at what's happened throughout history.

1944 The first computer, the Harvard Mark 1, put into service by the US government.

1947 Mobile phones were first suggested by Bell Laboratories in the US, using a series of radio grids or 'cells' - hence 'cellphone'. But the Federal Communications Commission was not willing to allocate enough radio frequency to mobile operators to actually make the proposition viable. In fact, they proposed enough to support only 23 conversations in each cell. The technology for transferring calls between cells was also problematic - those phones that did exist were required to stay within their cells until 1970, when 'call handover' protocol was developed for moving seamlessly between cells. But it was not until 1982 that the FCC agreed to allocate sufficient radio frequency to make mobile phones viable for the public. Once they'd finally done that, it only took a year for Motorola to release the first publicly available mobile phone.

1974 A closed Internet architecture was developed in the US. This was eventually put into action to create a network linking certain American Universities in 1983.

1983 The first mobile phone was launched by Motorola, using the 1G analogue network. On account of the size of these phones, they were originally targeted as car phones. However, as the decade progressed 'portable' phones were developed - although they were the size of a briefcase!

1989 The actual HTML- and HTTP-based architecture for an open-access Internet was developed in 1989 in Geneva, Switzerland by the British Scientist Tim Berners Lee.

1991 The first 2G mobile phone network opened in the Europe. This allowed mobile calling to take place digitally using GSM technology - with the result that mobile phones could be shrunk from the 'bricks' required by the previous analogue technology to pocket-sized devices that look more like today's mobiles.

1994 The World Wide Web opened for business properly when the US government released control of Internet addresses. Users climbed steadily during the middle of the decade - passing 25m in 1996 - before reaching take-off point in the late nineties, also precipitating a rapid investment boom-and-bust known as the dot.com bubble.

2001 The first large 3G network- or third generation - mobile phone network was set up in Japan allowing Internet access and multimedia messages. Although these are now mainstream in most developed markets, Japan has kept the lead from that early head-start. It is one of the few markets where almost all mobiles are now 3G and the previous generation 2G - still widely used in Europe and the US - is ready to be phased out.

2001 also saw Broadband become a viable option for people connecting to the Internet from home and office. This made it cost-effective for users to be online all the time while also downloading data much faster - considerably altering the Internet's role in society. During the following years, people expected friends and business contacts to be accessible online - while the ability to download information made file-sharing a phenomenon that threatened to undermine much of the entertainment media industry.

Also in 2001, the beginnings of VoIP technology were felt - standing for Voice over Internet Protocol. This channels audio data - mainly phone calls - over the Internet. It is much cheaper because VoIP does not require a single fixed connection to be open for the duration of the call, as is the case with a telephone line. Instead, it breaks the information down into 'packets', which are addressed to the destination and re-assembled by the computer or handset at that end.

By 2004 Mobile phones were gradually coming to incorporate better broadband access but the lack of really suitable handsets and ubiquitous Internet access meant the logical next step - mobile VoIP - was still delayed.

2007 onwards The Internet and mobile revolutions should finally come together as Mobile VoIP becomes easily available to the average, mainstream consumer. It is already being facilitated by applications that can be easily downloaded onto a wide range of available handsets, and powered by credits bought on the Internet. This vastly reduces call costs - especially for international calls and on-net calls, neither of which will be viewed as an expensive luxury in future. And services will be able to ensure cost is at a minimum by enabling the selection of the cheapest Internet access point available to the handset.

So if you thought we've got somewhere amazing in communications, you should see what else is happening - and not in the future, but now!

About the author:
At the forefront of changing the way we communicate, Yeigo is an innovative, VoIP software solution that can easily be downloaded to your phone allowing you to make cheaper mobile calls than ever before. A simple download to your handset is all it takes to get going.



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