Last week Bill Cobb, retired AT&T/US West Vice President and President shared the story of the telecommunications industry - where it began and where it’s headed.  Cobb's story began with Alexander Graham Bell, who invented and patented the first practical telephone (1876).  Bell also founded the original Bell Telephone Company later evolving into American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).  While the future of technology is constantly evolving, the exponential growth of data traffic is a given.

Originally, telephones were local, connected by wires and required a switchboard operator to connect one caller with another. As the Company grew, telephones required identification (numbers) and switchboard exchanges needed to be connected with one another. Western Electric started the automation of the industry with rotary phones which could identify callers and transfer them to the appropriate switching centers.
 
Area codes were then added to direct long-distance calls.  In 1947, with the discovery of the transistor, digital technology began finding its way into the Bell system.  Digital lines eliminated the need for direct connections between phones, and allowed multiple calls to travel over a single line. In 1968 the FCC allowed businesses to create their own in-house connections to the Bell System, as long as it didn’t interfere with the operation of the network.
 
With the invention of the router by the founders of Cisco Systems, local networks (LAN) could now also be connected. This led to the evolution of wide area data networks that could be connected between campuses and eventually Virtual Private Networks (eg, Facebook) that could be connected across the country.  In the 1980s with the development of the internet, networks began to be connected with other networks, and individual devices were given domain names and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (i.e. 192.0.2.53)
 
In 1995 the cable companies entered the fray by leveraging their millions of miles of coaxial cable which provided greater bandwidth capacity for digital connection. The telephone companies complained to the government about this unfair advantage resulting in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which called for ubiquitous connectivity among all the networks that provided both telecommunication services and high-speed internet access.  
 
To accelerate this process the F.C.C. began auctioning off electromagnetic spectrum which created the new Cellular Telephone Companies. The first-generation of mobile technology was called 1G and could barely accommodate phone calls. Now we are entering the fifth-generation world known as 5G which will provide pathways of gigabit connection between devices.  But it was the Fourth generation, or 4G technology, that was robust enough to support the introduction of the smartphone with its many data functions.  Apple’s iPhone was introduced in 2007 and is the result of international collaboration between different technology companies. The iPhone is assembled off shore by a company called Fox Conn, which is a $5Trillion dollar multinational conglomerate headquartered in Taiwan.
 
Our future requires telephone companies to install new switching technologies and intelligent routers to accommodate the exponential growth of data traffic.  Fiberoptic pathways have also been constructed to accommodate the massive data exchange between switching centers.  A new “Device Mesh Architecture” has replaced the old “Tree Model” and it now it can provide consistent communication paths from device to device without the need for user intervention.
 
Many of us are old enough to remember all these changes that have taken place in a single lifetime. What would Mr. Bell think if he could see what he started?