Communication, we come across this term in our daily life, as it is a medium through which we can exchange information to one another.

Without Communication TV, Smartphone has no existence. Whatever terms Hi, Hello ,whats up we are using would not exist ,if humans had not invented the term communicative skill .


The world is grooming day by day ,along with COMMUNICATION is also evolving. 
In this blog I will discuss about following aspects of communication.
  • Story behind invention of Communication.
  • Evolution of long distance Communication.
  • Electronic era of communication.
  • Evolution - wire to wireless.
  • Features of 4G over 3G.
  • Upcoming features of 5G.

Invention - The Man behind the story:

Here is the brief history of how communication was invented. The whole story of communication started with the caveman. The cavemen used to sit around the fire to discuss their daily activities. We can compare this to modern days social networking sites such as Facebook, twitter, & Instagram .After a while they started inscribing and drawing on the the caves like modern blogging or twitting. and From here the journey of Communication from cave drawing to digital communication started.

But, the problem with this mode of communication was that it was ghettoized(localised). When people started coming out of the cave, the need for distant communication started becoming urgent. But they also found a way out of it & that was "Smoke Signals"(Remember bear grills of Man v Wild).


Evolution of long distance Communication:

The first long distance communication was “Smoke Signals”. It was first used in Northern America. Let me explain, A smoke from top of the hill signified danger. White smoke signal is used to indicate the selection of new Pope(head of Roman catholic church).

And still it is used in Vatican city if any New Bishop is elected . 

Later there comes an era of pigeons.

As they have natural tendency of returning to home made them extensively useful for long distance communication. The Pigeons were used by Persians, Romans ,Greeks and Mughals(Remember the legendary hindi song 'Kabutar ja ja ja').

In early 1920's Pigeons were also used to send stock quotations to different cities.To relay messages in ancient times kings used Pony Express .
Pony express was used to deliver messages, mails, newspapers and small packages with help of horses.

It is regarded as the first courier service. It was used in the mid 19th Century to Communicate between the two opposite Coast of America.

Electronic era of communication:

Telegraph-Telegraphy was the greatest invention in the field of communication. Although the smoke signal was different form of telegraphy but the harnessing of electricity in the late 19th Century gave birth to electric telegraphy. Morse code is still used globally as a mode of communication by our spies which was named after Samuel Morse.Although few decades back Telegraphy was the most popular form of long distance communication but the US discontinued the use of Telegraph in 2006.India's BSNL owned telegraph service ended in 2013. It was the world's last existing true electric commercial telegraph system.


Evolution- Wire to wireless

Then the era of Radio came. It means "Beam of Light" in Latin.In 1864 Maxwell showed that electromagnetic waves could travel through free space.

  • In 1886 Heinrich Hertz found the existence of Electromagnetic Waves. 
  • In 1888 he demonstrated that one could produce and detect electromagnetic waves both in same time which we today call as radio waves. 
  • In November 1894 Jagadish Chandra Bose at Town Hall of Kolkata ignited gunpowder and rang a bell kept at a distance using microwave.
  •  In the same period of time an Italian Scientist Guglielmo Marconi made an electric bell which brust off during lightning. This was the beginning of a whole new era of long distant communication.

In the midst of World War 1 need for rapid communication accelerated the development of radio. After the war, commercial radio broadcasting began in 1920 and it was a master hit. In meanwhile the use of telephone started for diplomatic purposes and also for broadcasting.Even at that time telegraph was fastest way to communicate among common people as telephone connection could only be afford by rich people. Then after establishment of several telephone exchanges the beginning of the public Switch Telephone Network or PSTN (The Public Switched Telephone Network) started. But the progress took place after the second world war.  
  •  Mobile radio telephones were introduced for military communications in the early 20th century. 
  • Car-based telephones was first tested in Saint Louis in 1946. This system uses a  large transmitter on top of a high  building. A single channel was used for sending and receiving information . To talk, user had to push a button that enabled transmission and disabled reception.

Due to this, the system had come to known as “push-to-talk” systems in mid 1950s.IMTS (Improved Mobile Telephone System) was introduced in the 1960s to allow users to talk and listen at the same time. Two channels were used, one for sending and one for receiving the signals. In early 1970s some private companies had started developing their own systems to enhance the communication system. 

As we all know that independently developed systems are known as 1st Generation communication or 1G. It was introduced in 1982 by Bell Labs and popularly known as Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS). The key idea here was to divide geographical areas into cells. As a result AMPS could support 5 to 10 times more users than IMTS. Major drawback of 1G was that it had weak network over air and also no roaming. Now, To implement roaming, Individual organisations started working under one umbrella, European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) developed 2nd Generation system.


As 2G communications could deliver data at the rate of  9.6 Kbps.The purpose of introducing 2G to the world was to provide data services to the mobile and to send text messages. At this span of time the internet was also becoming popular and data services were becoming more universal.

In Post 2.5G,phones started to support web browsing and multimedia services & streaming started growing too.

Now coming back to 3rd Generation .The goal of UMTS or 3G wireless systems was to provide a minimum data rate of 2 Mbit/s for stationary or walking users, and 384 kb it/s in a moving vehicle.

This introduces us to the most awaited part Long term evolution (LTE) whose initial goal were mobility and global connectivity, but as the technology evolved the Services started expanding.

Now Services were not only restricted to Voice and SMS only. For the growth and efficient implementation in LTE, whole new architecture was adopted for both non Radio part

(SAE)System Architecture Evolution and Radio part using pure IP Architecture (packet switching).A lot of telecom companies joined together to achieve their only vision.


Some of the significant features of 4G are:

• It took less time for both connection establishment and transmission of data.

• For uniformity of service provision cell-edge bit-rate had increased.

• The price charged per bit had also been reduced, implying improved spectral efficiency.

• Simplified network architecture;

These requirements were fulfilled by advancement in the underlying mobile radio technology. Now it's time to move from services to multiservices approach, in other word from LTE Advanced to next Generation communication system which is 5th Generation.

Features that have been planned to be added in the 5th Generation Or next generation systems are:

  • Pervasive networks - A large  network which will be operated from almost everyehere.
  • Group cooperative relay - In this technique high data rates are available over a wider area of the cell.
CONCLUSION:- 
Communication plays a tremendous role in the boosting the country's status.If communication
had not been developed, this corona virus pandemic would have seperated us completely from the society.
Communication reduced the distance between people.This evolution has given us a lot of online platforms, through which we can talk to anyone comfortably without any issue and waiting like Facebook, Whatsup, Instagram Twitter &So on.
As in this blog we have covered the caveman communication symstem to modern days 5G system.
____Thanku____