VIDEO: History of the telephone – 150 years in 5 minutes

Transcript:

Hi, welcome to the Telonium Thursdays Whiteboard Web Series. I’m your host for the week, Alice. Here’s at Telonium, we’re going to be bringing you weekly videos with everything you would ever want to know about Telonium and VoIP. So let’s get started.

Okay, let’s start in the year 1876. This year might sound familiar; it’s the year Alexander Graham Bell invented the first practical telephone. From then on, the telephone and the telephone industry were revolutionary.

At the beginning, people were connected through one telephone line. Sounds pretty simple, but this wasn’t practical. There were many issues. For example, if someone else wanted to join in, let’s say Bob, there would have to be as many wires as there were people. So, because of this issue, they decided to come up with a solution, called a central office. So, through the central office, all the wires were connected into one place. Then, a group of central offices was made. This network was called the Public Switch Telephone Network or PSTN. Central offices were first operated by human operators, then they switched to rotary, and later it switched to digital, which a hundred years later is what they’re still using. There were a few other issues with the central office, one of them being that if someone decided to start a company in, say, Atlanta; business was doing great, they had a lot of customers. They decided they wanted to move to New York.  The problem with that is that central offices are geographically defined, so when the company moved to New York, they would have to get a whole new number, which can be pretty annoying for a business.

Alright, while this was going on, something else came about – a little something called the Internet – green marker please. Thank you! So, thanks to the Internet, it led to a technology called Voice Over Internet Protocol AKA VoIP. VoIP was able to deliver voice over an already-existing Internet connection But when VoIP first came out over 20 years ago, the Internet was less reliable and also not very fast, and you can remember trying to sign on to AOL. It took forever. Since then the Internet has sped up a lot, it’s become a lot more reliable as well, thanks to things like DSL, fiber, and cable. So now, VoIP is not only now attainable, but it’s also became a popular solution for businesses. And because you can now get voice and data over one network, it’s making it so PSTN is almost obsolete.

Alright, so what makes VoIP so great? First of all, VoIP is affordable, because it’s much easier to maintain and operate. Secondly, it’s available ANYWHERE – as long as you have a high speed internet connection. And third, it’s scalable – with VoIP, you can have as many lines as you want through a single connection to the internet.

 Okay everyone, I hoped you learned a little bit today, don’t forget to tune in next week to a new addition of Telonium Thursdays. And until then, you can follow us on Twitter at @telonium or visit our website at www.telonium.com. Thanks everyone!