Back in the late 19th century, when the telecommunications industry first started, the only service that was provided was the so called Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) that offered calls between two fixed telephones. And while there have been advancements in the way calls are made (the introduction of direct dialing for example), the designs of the phones (from large wall mounted phones to smaller wireless handsets as an example) and the method of transmitting the call from one party to the other (analogue to digital); the basic premise has remained the same for over 150 years – a landline call still takes place along fixed wires that run from one telephone to the other (via a series of cabinets and exchanges).
Where the telecommunications industry has seen its greatest changes is in the types of devices that are now used for communication, both using fixed lines and mobile technology.
Fixed line technologies
The biggest change that has occurred to fixed line communications is that it is no longer just humans talking to each other. In 1964, Xerox Corporation introduced what many consider to be the first commercialized version of the modern fax machine and in 1966 improved it with the introduction of the Magnafax Telecopiers that could be connected to a standard telephone line. During the 1980s, fax machines became ubiquitous in offices throughout the UK. Fax machines are becoming less important as time passes and computer communications take their place.
From the early adapters of dial-up connectivity in the 1980s and ‘90s, through to the broadband connections that are present in virtually every business and household in the UK, the home computer revolution has perhaps had the biggest impact on fixed line communication in the UK.
In the 1980s, privately run Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) started to gain popularity alongside the developing home computer revolution. Often run by individuals from their spare rooms using basic home computers and a single phone line, these systems were painfully slow to connect to with speeds often being limited to 300, 1200 or 2400 baud (bits per second) compared with the 20 million bps and above speeds that are enjoyed today.
In the early 1990s, commercial Internet Service Providers such as Pipex, Demon Internet and America Online started to provide ways for individuals to connect to their own online services and the wider Internet. However, these so called narrowband services had one major drawback in that voice calls and data calls could not be made at the same time.
The introduction of commercial broadband service in the 2000s removed this restriction and allowed the signal in one line to be split between telephone and Internet data, enabling users to be online and make phone calls at the same time. These broadband connections still take place over the standard copper telephone wires of user’s standard telephone lines. There have of course been technological advances in the types of cabling that is used to increase connection speeds, but those are best discussed in another post.
Mobile communications
Perhaps the biggest advancements in the telecommunications industry have taken place around mobile communications and systems such as pagers, mobile telephones and more recently smartphones. The technology behind mobile communications is not new though.
Pagers were first patented in the late 1940s and became widely used during the 1980s. Even now in the 21st century, pagers remain in use with some emergency services due to their reliability.
Similarly, mobile telephones of one form or another have been around since the mobile radio telephones of the late 1950s, although these early pre-cellular systems (also known as 0G) operate in a totally different way to the cellular technology that is common today. In 1959, the ‘Post Office South Lancashire Radiophone Service’, was launched, covering South Lancashire and is cited as the UK’s first mobile phone network.
Modern mobile technology came to the fore in the mid 1980s with the introduction of the first generation (1G) analogue networks run by Cellnet and Vodafone. These networks provide only voice and SMS (text message) services and the phones that supported them were usually limited to small LED or LCD displays. With the introduction of the digital 2G networks, Cellnet and Vodafone were joined as licence holders in the early 1990s by Mercury One2One and Orange.
In the early 2000s, Cellnet (by then known as O2), Vodafone, Mercury One2One (renamed by then to T-Mobile) and Orange were joined by Hutchison 3G (branded as 3) as licence holders for the new 3G networks. In 2010, T-Mobile and Orange merged to form Everything Everywhere (subsequently renamed to EE).
There are several other companies such as Virgin Mobile UK and, Tesco Mobile that act as mobile virtual network operators, using the infrastructure of the main mobile companies.
It was the introduction of 3G (and subsequently 4G technologies in the early 2010s) that really lead to the explosion in the popularity of mobile communications. The 1G and 2G phones with their limited voice and texting features have been long since been replaced by smartphones, combining combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. Smartphones now offer computing power and audio/video capabilities that far exceed those of home computers from only 20 or 30 years ago, all in the palm of your hand.
There is of course one major impact that all these different methods of communication have had (particularly mobile technology) and that is on the demand for telephone numbers. Each machine, be it a pager, smartphone, fax machine or landline needs its own telephone number, and this has meant that several times over the past few decades, the UK has had to undergo changes to telephone numbering to cater for the increasing demand for telephone numbers.