Connecting the telephone of the future
2008-08-18

 

The telephone today is a ubiquitous or even obsolete tool of communication and information exchange. Breaking the gap between two persons, it offers voice connection in a most cost-effective price. Like its literal meaning£¬the word tele, meaning afar, and phone, meaning voice.

Early Telephone Development Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. He made his first call in March to Thomas A. Watson, saying, "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you." Few people considered Bell's invention more than a toy, but it did not take long for people to install telephones in their homes, businesses, or towns. Bell owned the patents to the equipment and leased them out. Like other new technology, fantastic rumors about its abilities spread as telephones appeared first in New England, but quickly spread west. Technology for the telephone continued to develop, while simultaneously a new industry had spun off, the telecom industry. Related technology was developed as a result of this invention, as well as an entire telephone system was deployed throughout the world.

Telephones Today

Today our telecom infrastructure has far surpassed the dream of Alexander Gram Bell and Thomas Watson. Calling to your neighbors, or the other side of the world is easy, affordable and possible from almost every house across the world. The telecom industry has exploded with all different types of products making calling easier and cheaper. Today we have the telecom industry, which relies around Bell’s invention of the 1870’s. There are about 400 varieties and styles of telephone sells in the market, the national telephone sales during the year was about more than 4,000 million units. Common telephone products include the push-button telephone, the caller ID telephone, the recording telephone, the SMS telephone, the cordless telephone and so on. However, there are only three types we usually use in the office and family: 1. The ordinary push-button telephone This is the most widely used types, besides the two basic functions, answering and dialing, it has many types and models according to its auxiliary functions. Common auxiliary functions are: Redial, pause, volume, silent, hands-free, adjustable ring tones, number storing key, flashing lights for the ringing, Time display, and so on. 2. The cordless telephone The host phone is basically the same as the ordinary push-button type. The difference is that the majority of the host phones and son phones can call the other. 3. The recording telephone There are several types, such as the auto answer, call recorder, the full-functioned type. 

The outlook of the telephone Making such predictions is a dangerous business, however, one clear thing is that phones will pack a lot more computing power in future, and will be able to do more and more of the things that PCs are used for today—and more besides. Studies show that people read around ten megabytes (MB) worth of material a day; hear 400MB a day, and see one MB of information every second. In a decade's time a typical phone will have enough storage capacity to be able to video its user's entire life. Is your telephone ready for VoIP? Internet Protocol (IP) telephony (also known as Internet telephony) is a service based on Voice over IP (VoIP), a disruptive technology that is rapidly gaining ground against traditional telephone network technologies. VoIP technology takes phone calls and turns them into digital files, which are broken into packets of data, sent through the phone network, and then converted back into voice calls on the other end. It's similar to how the Web handles e-mail. The advantage of breaking voice calls into digital packets is that you no longer need a phone line to make a call -- you simply use your broadband connection. It also means you can treat your phone calls like data files, which lets you fine-tune your phone system. Services will be more diversified Since A.T.&T.'s divestiture, both long-distance carriers and local telephone companies have increased efforts to modernize their networks by replacing old-fashioned analog equipment, in which signals are transmitted in the form of distortion-prone electromagnetic waves through copper wire. Nowadays, the most modern networks use more efficient optical fibers to carry information in the form of laser beams instead of electricity. New telephone technologies are also beginning to give consumers more control over who they allow to electronically enter their homes. Some communities, for example, are already experimenting with systems that allow a customer to see on a digital display the phone number from which a call is coming. Some customers can program their phones to reject calls from certain numbers and to identify frequent callers by assigning each a distinctive ring. Other services that have been proposed include electronic burglar alarms, classified advertisements, travel reservation services and electronic banking and shopping - all using the telephone. Like airlines, the phone companies may offer different classes of telephone service: economy class for chit-chat or first class high-fidelity service for important business conversations.