Week 4 - reflective post

Starting with the smoke signals, and pigeons, telecommunications played significant role in all societies. Since humans are “social animals” they have a need to communicate, weather that is for business or personal reasons. With the technological inventions made in 18th and 19th centuries in the communications and transportation areas, the development in telecommunications and networks started growing exponentially. Bell’s invention of phone was a revolution in private communications, while Tesla’s invention of radio paved a way to a true global communications. Simultaneously, networks started to develop and soon entire industry based on communications was started. This has in turn accelerated exchange of news, ideas which resulted in commerce and trade sector rapidly growing.
Telecommunication and Networks are in a way connected to a technological progress of our society. We can practically track technological progress of the society by tracking the progress in telecommunications and networks. Today one smart phone probably has more computing power than all computers put together used in the World War II which happened only about 65 years ago. Satellite phones are already a reality today and they allow a voice and data communications from anywhere on the planet which was no possible until recently. Today’s fiber optical networks are transferring petabytes of data each day between different continents which were unthinkable just two decades ago. We can only imagine what will happen with telecommunications and networks in another 50 years.