Developing of telecommunications

Late in the nineteenth century communications facilities were augmented by a new invention – telephone. In the USA its use slowly expanded, and by 1900 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company controlled 855,000 telephones; but elsewhere the telephone made little headway until the twentieth century. After 1900, however, telephone installations extended much more rapidly in all the wealthier countries. The number of telephones in use in the world grew at almost 100 per cent per decade. But long-distance telephone services gradually developed and began to compete with telegraphic business. A greater contribution to long-range communication came with the development of wireless. Before the outbreak of the First World War wireless telegraphy was established as a means of regular communication with ships at sea, and provided a valuable supplement to existing telegraph lines and cables. In the next few years the telephone systems of all the chief countries were connected with each other by radio. Far more immediate was the influence that radio had through broadcasting and by television, which followed it at an interval of about twenty-five years.

Telephones are as much a form of infrastructure as roads or electricity, and competition will make them cheaper. Losses from lower prices will be countered by higher usage, and tax revenues will benefit from the faster economic growth that telephones bring about. Most important of all, by cutting out the need to install costly cables and microwave transmitters, the new telephones could be a boon to the remote and poor regions of the earth. Even today, half the world’s population lives more than two hours away from a telephone, and that is one reason why they find it hard to break out of their poverty. A farmer’s call for advice could save a whole crop; access to a handset could help a small rural business sell its wares. And in rich places with reasonable telephone systems already in place, the effect of new entrants – the replacement of bad, overpriced services with clever, cheaper ones – is less dramatic but still considerable.

Global phones are not going to deliver all these benefits at once, or easily. Indeed, if the market fails to develop, it could prove too small to support the costs of launching satellites. Still, that is a risk worth taking. And these new global telephones reflect a wider trend. Lots of other new communication services – on-line film libraries, personal computers that can send video-clips and sound-bites as easily as they can be used for writing letters, terrestrial mobile-telephone systems cheap enough to replace hard-wired family sets – are already technically possible. What they all need is deregulation. Then any of them could bring about changes just as unexpected and just as magical as anything that Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone has already achieved.

Sattelite sirvices

Our world has become an increasingly complex place in which, as individuals, we are very dependent on other people and on organizations. An event in some distant part of the globe can rapidly and significantly affect the quality of life in our home country.

This increasing independence, on both a national and international scale, has led us to create systems that can respond immediately to dangers, enabling appropriate defensive or offensive actions to be taken. These systems are operating all around us in military, civil, commercial and industrial fields.

A worldwide system of satellites has been created, and it is possible to transmit signals around the globe by bouncing them from on satellite to an earth station and thence to another satellite.

Originally designed to carry voice traffic, they are able to carry hundreds of thousands of separate simultaneous calls. These systems are being increasingly adopted to provide for business communications, including the transmission of traffic for voice, facsimile, data and vision.

It is probable that future satellite services will enable a great variety of information services to transmit directly into the home, possibly including personalized electronic mail. The electronic computer is at the heart of many such systems, but the role of telecommunications is not less important. There will be a further convergence between the technologies of computing and telecommunications. The change will be dramatic: the database culture, the cashless society, the office at home, the gigabit-per-second data network.

We cannot doubt that the economic and social impact of these concepts will be very significant. Already, advanced systems of communication are affecting both the layman and the technician . Complex functions are being performed by people using advanced terminals which are intended to be as easy to use as the conventional telephone.

The new global satellite-communications systems will offer three kinds of service, which may overlap in many different kinds of receivers:

Voice. Satellite telephones will be able to make calls from anywhere on earth to anywhere else. That could make them especially useful to remote, third-world villages (some of which already use stationary satellite telephones), explorers and disaster-relief teams. Today’s mobile phones depend on earth-bound transmitters, whose technical standards vary from country to country. So business travelers cannot use their mobile phones on international trips. Satellite telephones would make that possible.

Massaging. Satellite messagers have the same global coverage as satellite telephones, but carry text alone, which could be useful for those with laptop computers. Equipped with a small screen like today’s pagers, satellite messagers will also receive short messages.

Tracking. Voice and messaging systems will also tell their users where they are to within a few hundred metres. Combined with the messaging service, the location service could help rescue teams to find stranded adventurers, the police to find stolen cars, exporters to follow the progress of cargoes, and haulage companies to check that drivers are not detouring to the pub. Satellite systems will provide better positioning information to anyone who has a receiver for their signals.