Telecommunications

With around two trillion text messages sent in America alone every year, SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application in the world and the number two use of mobile phones - the first being to check the time. It's also a cash cow for telecommunications companies with the average charge worldwide of around US$0.10 per message for data that essentially costs the telco nothing to transmit because it is sent on the control channel - a small part of radio bandwidth that is used to send information between the tower and phone about call setups. Apple's iOS 5 update - if you can get it installed - sees the addition of a new iMessage app that could have telcos nervous as it allows text messages to be sent for next to nothing. Read More

Since the dawn of the space age, NASA has been relying on radio communications technology to send and receive data to and from spacecraft. Although it has developed higher data-rate radio frequency systems, data-compression, and other techniques to boost the amount of data that its current RF systems can handle, they can't keep pace with the projected data needs of advanced instruments and further human exploration. To break this bottleneck, NASA is turning to optical communications technology that would use lasers to increase data rates over existing systems by anywhere from 10 to 100 times. Read More

Duke University is on a roll, showing off yet another potentially game-changing property of the exotic man-made substances known as metamaterials. This time the property could have deep consequences for the transmission of information via light. Maybe the most important potential use of all. Read More

As the amount of information being electronically shuttled around the planet continues to grow, so does the need for effective means of relaying it. The use of optical fibers has definitely helped in that regard, although thanks to a recent breakthrough at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, optical fiber signals may soon be able to travel four times farther than they are presently able to. Researchers there have created an optical amplifier, capable of amplifying light while maintaining a relatively noise-free signal. Read More

During the first decade of the 21st century, information and communication technologies (ICTs) came within reach of most of the world's people. As part of World Statistics Day, the United Nations commissioned the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for current data and statistics on ICTs. The resulting report: The World In 2010: ICT Facts and Figures provides an insight into just how phenomenal the growth of ICTs have been over the past few years. Read More

Prepare for some mind-boggling numbers. A new study has estimated how much information there is in the world in terms of how much humankind is able to store, communicate and compute. Looking at the period from 1986 to 2007, the study is the first to quantify humankind’s ability to handle information and how it has changed in the past two decades. But despite the monumental figures, the numbers still pale in comparison to the order of magnitude with which nature handles information. Read More

Cream brought the country blues classic Sittin' on top of the world to an international audience in the late 1960s... and now you can watch it on YouTube while you're sitting there. Through its subsidiary Ncell, the Swedish telecommunications group TeliaSonera has launched 3G services in the Mount Everest area of Nepal – which makes the company the providers of the world's highest mobile data service. Read More

Unsurprisingly, the Australian outback doesn’t exactly boast the greatest mobile phone coverage in the world. But researchers down under have managed to make mobile phone calls in this remote landscape without the use of towers or satellites. Instead of relying on expensive infrastructure, the researchers created a mesh-based phone network between Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones that allowed them to communicate with each other. Read More

Accessing the Internet while away from the home or office has never been easier. When there’s no Wi-Fi available users can jump on 3G broadband to get their online fix. And that’s the way it has generally been, with the two main mobile communications technologies acting as complementary services. But with the advent of Wi-Fi based municipal wireless networks some experts say there is a strong possibility that Wi-Fi will compete with the 3G cell phone network in city areas and perhaps even become a substitute. Read More