"From a booth set up in Grand Central Terminal, a person could talk to a friend in Chicago or Washington while also seeing them on a small video screen. The friend would also have to go to a special booth in those cities to take the call. The price for the novelty of a three-minute call was $16. That would be equivalent to $121 in today’s money."
This excerpt comes from the New York Times piece How the Future Looked in 1964: The Picturephone.
You may have seen the term Internet of Things thrown around on our site before. If you’ve found yourself Googling IoT, look no further. Here’s a quick explanation.
Last year Ethernet turned 43 – and it remains one of the most widely-used local area network technologies.
And as far as telecoms history goes, few modern tools have a naming story quite like Ethernet’s.
Here's a good one from the archives.
"America and Europe will soon be linked by the first trans-Atlantic telephone cables," reads this March 1954 article from Popular Mechanics.
With the TeleGeography Report hot off the press, it seems that this year's data contains more than a few good stories.
First up is the curious discovery that 2015 marked a turning point in the market. It was the first time since the Great Depression that international carrier voice traffic declined.
Any good telecoms scholar has probably come across Charles K. Kao.
But even if you aren’t familiar with Kao, you’ve benefitted from his work. You might know him better as the father of fiber optic communication.
The last few weeks have seen a flurry of announcements regarding trials and proposed commercial rollouts of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) technology.
So what can we expect to see from NB-IoT and which operators are looking to deploy it?
One tiny data packet has traveled the world. It’s made its way from Sydney, Australia, all the way to London, traversing undersea cables to reach its intended destination.
But here’s something interesting: the (potentially) most expensive part of this data packet’s trip is only just beginning. How could this be?
A planned auction of spectrum in the 694MHz-790MHz (700MHz) band in Sweden has been postponed, while the recent sale of frequencies in the same band in India attracted no bidders.
No. This effect has nothing to do with a big parade.
The trombone effect, or just "tromboning," attempts to categorize the curious, latency-causing path information might travel due to the hub-and-spoke nature of the internet.
