There have been a number of great inventions in human history – fire, the wheel, the little black dress – and one that stands tall amongst the rest is the telephone.
Historically, the government has provided the phone systems as part of the national infrastructure. These government departments were eventually privatised into the monoliths of today’s telecommunications world – in New Zealand, Telecom, in the UK, British Telecom, or BT.
Not only did these companies provide and manage the infrastructure of the telephone system, they also got into the business of providing the telephone instruments. When telephones were still relatively expensive, the national provider would rent out phones to residential customers. This sometimes went on unnoticed for a good length of time. My partner discovered he had been renting a Telecom home phone for about eight years. He could have bought a very nice mobile phone for what he had paid. There might still be some BT home phones lurking out there, adding a small but significant amount to your monthly phone bill.
But the telecommunications landscape is changing. Obviously traditional, fixed line telephone systems are here to stay for a while yet, because anything where there is significant investment by business doesn’t get replaced overnight. But telecoms means much more than just telephones these days, as is obvious when you look at what the telcos get involved in. The mobile phone revolution has taken phones away from a set physical location and the advent of texting must be a bit like printing money for the telcos.
But of course, the big change in communication technology is the internet. This puts the concept of ‘phone’ into sharp relief, because a phone is just a handset – it’s the technology behind it that’s interesting. The telephone system is now much more than a technological extension of the piece of string between two tin cans. Now the handset or the computer (is this just another type of handset?) can broadcast to sites like Twitter and other bulletin boards. Everyone can commentate on what they’re doing right now and what they’re thinking. Communication is much more one-way – I’ll put out there what I’m doing and thinking, and you come along at your convenience and read up about it. Not so much conversation as a bunch of monologues with everyone talking and no-one listening.
We can spice up our pearls of wisdom (hey, what am I doing, but putting a whole lot of opinions ‘out there’, with no real care as to whether anyone reads them or not?) with bright images and streaming video, which of course increases our need for bandwidth, hence the forward movement in broadband technology (SDSL internet etc).
So, it is a changing world we live in. The way we interact is changing. We call it communication technology, but if I recall correctly, communication is a two-way thing. Maybe we should call it broadcast technology.
Tags: BT, BT home phones, SDSL internet, telecoms, telephone system