*World Telecommunication Day*
Telecommunication and information technology have made our lives a hundred
times easier , though not necessarily happier.World Telecommunication day has been celebrated annually on 17th May since
1969, marketing the founding of ITU and the signing of the first international
Telegraph Convention in 1865. It was instituted by the Plenipotentiary Conference
in Malaga Torremolinos in 1973.
Telecommunication: Connecting the World
Today , at the beginning of the 21st century sentences like this are uttered at any
instant all around the world. Fifty years ago nobody would have pronounced it. The
telephone was restricted to a miniority of people in the so called developed world
and it was barely existent in most parts of the world .
In the last fifty years , the international telecommunication union[ITU] has reported,
on a yearly basis, the penetration of telephones in the various countries of the world.
The USA progressed from less than 20% to close to 50% of the population and
almost 100% of house holds. Europe has been lagging behind but has been a close
follower, with higher penetration in the Nordic Countries and less in the
Mediterranean region, till the 1980’s.
The wireless and the internet discontinues : 10 years to change telecommunication.
Telecommunication services have been provided till the 1990’s through fixed,
copper lines . Their development was costly and took a lot of planning and time.
The maintenance of the network was also very expensive and, in most situations,
there was no economic sense in developing such an infrastructure; too few users, too
dispered geographically and with very little economic spending capacity to sustain a
return on investment.
A wireless infrastructure has a completely different cost sharing model. Whilst in a
fixed line infrastructure close to 100% of the investment is burdening the network
operator and has to be made before the infrastructure becomes available, in the
wireless infrastructure only 30% of the cost is from operator’ pocket. The other 70%
comes from investment in terminals , usually sustained by users.
Conversely , internet was traditionally about data communication. At the turn of the
century. Voice over IP moved from being a technology to become a viable
technology . In 2005 skype exceeded the threshold of 50 million users of its VoIP
service. Clearly the dissemination of broadband connections made this possible.
Skype is just one of many service providers offering VoIP. The main motivation to
use VoIP has been the much lower price associated to this communication.
150 years in a Blink of an EYE: A very short history of telecommunication.
Google and you can get as many histories of telecommunications as you wish. The
point here is not provide yet another controversial telecom history but look at its
evolution in terms of achievements, the whole in a very few pages.
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