Telco Origins - Part 1

I was giving a lecture to a group of eager young students a few years ago and I asked if any of them had an idea of who created American telecommunications.  I chuckled when one student raised their hand and guessed Ma Bell, as if that was the name of an elderly maternal woman that had launched a global industry. Part of the reason for the ignorance is that, like so much of the telco industry, the story has many facets that make it difficult to definitively trace the history.  That ends today.  I am going to tell you the annotated history of telco over the next few weeks because, in order to understand the business and its path of evolution, it helps to know the back story and how decisions and innovations have shaped our industry over the years.

You could argue that the early use of smoke signals and drums by the natives were actually the first recorded use of telecommunications.  They were used in much the same societal role as systems today - to send messages to, and communicate with, the applicable parties they wished to reach.  Can you imagine the stress of primitive IT workers way back then?  There was no such thing as an email registering a complaint; it was more likely a disgruntled colleague showed dissatisfaction by shooting the technician with an arrow or clubbing them over the head.  Job security was fleeting.

While there were basic systems developed in the late 1700's through the early 1800's resulting in the creation of the semaphore system, that system itself was abandoned several years later because the towers were way too expensive and it was difficult to find enough operators that had the skill to actually use and manage it.  The telegraph system, invented by Samuel Morse in 1844, is considered the earliest industrial iteration of successful telecommunications. Originally used primarily by the Post Office, the telegraph system actually grew and expanded along with the building of the railroad systems. These communication links  were integral in moving goods and people from East to West and back again along the tracks.  In many instances telco connectivity was established in an area before being followed by railroad construction.  No wonder "training" is such a huge requirement for our industry!  :-)

A Day of (digital) Freedom...

As the nation celebrates its successful fight for liberty on this fourth of July, it's fascinating to note how many liberties we've willfully given up these last ten years and how that impacts security for both cloud storage and data transmission.  One of the major factors individuals and companies cite as their reason for refusing cloud based technologies is security; they stress the need to ensure privacy and corporate governance that can be better achieved if the information is on premise.

http://edgestrategies.com/component/k2/item/117-just-released-2012-microsoft-edge-technologies-smb-cloud-adoption-study.html

While this logic may seem sound and provide a sense of comfort, this is simply not the case.  As more information comes to light about the NSA activities and Google's own admissions about data mining, the idea that shared information is safe just because it's behind your firewall is an illusion.  In fact, leading edge cloud storage providers can actually offer greater protection of your data than private enterprises for a fraction of the cost, monitored around the clock and with better ease of use to both the client and their customers. For example, an exploit from the inside the corporate environment makes the firewall moot.  Having an outsourced partner that is more focused in the area of security, and that is also less susceptible to internal exploits (i.e. via employees, infected end-users, etc.) is actually safer than the notion of doing it “in-house”.  Just because one has physical “control”, doesn’t mean the infrastructure is safer.  

Creating truly secure environments, you see, is the ultimate dilemma - by making something more secure, you're simultaneously making that piece of information more difficult to access for the others that need it.  The ability to quickly service and respond to a client usually trumps the need for privacy.  We see that more and more as people start to employ popular applications like Dropbox and Evernote.  In this high security world we worry too much about guarding information from imagined threats and not enough about sharing it properly, securely and effectively.  Cywest Communications understands this and we're developing solutions that address the customer's need for security and ease of use specifically.  As Thomas Jefferson said, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it."