When Mr. Alexander Graham Bell famously shouted that famous phrase requesting his assistant to come to him, the device which we would come to know as the telephone was born. This remarkable device was immediately recognized as a runaway business success by Mr. Bell himself, who immediately set out to market it. He was not alone, however, as a Mr. Elisha Gray also independently invented the same device, but Bell won out in court. The race was on and it would lead to an unimaginable consideration at the time; the advantages of VOIP versus the traditional PSTN phone.
Within one year of its invention, there were ten thousand in service, a miraculous expansion. Such success would necessarily attract competition, and in the US one would expect lawsuits. One would not be disappointed. A man by the name of Theodore Vail was named to manage the Bell Company, and he fought any form of competition with great intensity. In fact when it was over, the Bell Company fought 600 lawsuits and emerged the winner in every single case.
One of the more significant cases involved the now famous Western Union Company, who marketed a telephone that was clearly a violation of the Bell patents. When they lost the ensuing legal battle, Bell inherited some 56,000 more telephones, laying the foundation of what would become a monolithic giant. Although the early battles were all in favor of the Bell empire, it would not always remain so.
The culture of the Bell Company, now known as American Telephone and Telegraph, was that of a large, slow to respond enterprise with poor customer service. This helped competition battle into contention with the giant. But nature would smile on the Bell Company in the form of a hurricane that took out half a million phones along the eastern seaboard. Their response served to shore up the weakened public image they had developed in the past, and they were doing well again.
Just before World War II, there were over 15 million telephones in service. This figure doubled by 1948, owing to the pent up demand that developed during the war and the available labor pool following the demobilization. This was a time for great innovation and creativity in the telephone industry. Scientists at Bell laboratory invented the transistor in 1947, a feat so significant technologically they received the Nobel prize for their work in 1948.
In one of the more significant milestones for the telephone, the touch tone phone was introduced in 1963. At the same time, the number of phones connected through a party line was rapidly decreasing, down to a mere 25 percent by 1965. This decade also saw the launch of the first two communication satellites, Echo I and Telstar. By 1971 the US reached the 100,000 telephones in service milestone.
The year 1974 marked a major event in telephone history, the Federal Communication Commission filed suit to break up the bell system, calling it a monopoly. The case would drag on until 1983, but it would in fact break up the company into the so called baby bells. This heralded a period of intensive change, innovation and creativity.
With dizzying speed there were more companies and devices competing in the communication than the average individual could keep up with. A notable invention was the computer, and with it the era of digital communication. Now just about any form of communication could be transmitted over cable, bounced over satellite and received by a plethora of instruments.
Service for the computer, television and telephone were increasingly combined by service providers in bundles, as they could all use the same cables, satellite technology or fiber optic mode of transmission. This led to the gradual blurring of the lines defining each device a separate entity as increasingly each could perform the functions of the other.
In a final progression the telephone can use computer infrastructure for its transmission, and in many cases provides benefits through this methodology. First of all, there is no reason for redundant cables, the computer layout is already there, and with the use of wireless technology, telephones are essentially a free accessory. The quality of sound is excellent, due to the nature of digital communication without even being tied to a facility. The advantages of VOIP versus the traditional PSTN phone will only grow in the future.
Author Resource:-
Asterisk phone system provider offers support on voip and pbx in Toronto and Business Center solutions.
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