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Telecommunications infrastructure has evolved from physical wires and cables to wireless technology, including satellites and signal towers. The invention of the telegraph and telephone required infrastructure, and the development of fiber optic cables allowed for the creation of the internet. Modern infrastructure includes cell phones and Wi-Fi transmitters.
Since its invention, communications technology has always depended on some form of telecommunications infrastructure. In this case, infrastructure refers to a network of computing centers and devices designed to send electronic signals from one location to another. Early forms of telecommunications infrastructure depended on wires and cables that had to be physically strung anywhere, no matter how remote. Modern infrastructure increasingly uses wireless technology that communicates with satellites, signal towers, or small local devices in a home or business.
Before the advent of electronic communications, any message sent to a distant location had to be delivered by hand, a time-consuming and costly process. Public and private postal services have been aided by innovative approaches such as semaphore signals, beacon lights or even smoke signals. Each of these methods required infrastructure, a pre-existing network set up to process and deliver messages. When the telegraph was invented in the 1830s, it too required an infrastructure, a network of wires to communicate the telegraph signal. By the 1860s, telegraph cables, the first telecommunications infrastructure, had been placed in various nations around the world.
The telegraph allowed messages to be delivered one letter at a time over great distances using methods such as Morse code. The telegraph was superseded by the invention of the telephone in the 1870s, but the idea behind telecommunications infrastructure remains unchanged, even into the 21st century. While the telephone could transmit voice information almost instantaneously over great distances, it still required an infrastructure of wires, cables, and human operators. In the 1950s, ships installed undersea telephone cables connecting continents, an engineering feat that created the first truly global telecommunications infrastructure.
As telephone technology has advanced over the decades, simple electronic cables have been replaced with fiber optic cables. These can communicate more information faster, using light rather than electricity as the means to transmit the signal. This allowed for the widespread use of facsimile machines, or fax machines, that could transmit documents over telephone lines. Once a worldwide telecommunications infrastructure was created with fiber optic cables, the internet became a possibility. Computer networks used existing telephone lines to transmit not only text and images, but also videos, businesses, and complicated interactive websites.
In the 21st century, the telecommunications infrastructure includes cell phones that can wirelessly transmit signal to satellites in space, as long as they are within range of a broadcast tower. Transmission towers have been erected all over the world, allowing a credit card-sized device to communicate with any other telephone, anywhere on Earth. The Wi-Fi infrastructure allows Internet-ready computers to have roughly the same coverage without being directly connected to telephone lines. Instead, they can communicate wirelessly with Wi-Fi transmitters located in many businesses, homes, and even remote, previously inaccessible locations, such as the summit of Mount Everest.
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