Linking the world
Networks now link the world, but how they do it so well has taken ingenuity. Electrical engineers and computer scientists have built them and are still finding ways to improve them, allowing ever more data to quickly travel the world.
Without the networks beneath them all the applications we now expect: phones, video sharing, social media, streaming, games, banking and more couldn’t exist.
The Optical Pony Express
Suppose you want to send messages as fast as possible. What’s the best way to do it? By light in optical networks, but even then with innovation you can speed things up…(Read on)
How Madonna crashed the Internet
When Madonna took to the stage at Brixton Academy in 2001 she made Internet history and caused more that a little Internet misery. Her concert was live streamed over the Internet. A record-breaking audience of 9 million tuned in, and that’s where the trouble started…(read on)
Why is your Internet so slow
Sometimes we enjoy really fast Internet access, and yet at other times it’s frustratingly slow! So the question is why, and what does this have to do with posting a letter, or cars on a motorway? And how did electronic engineers turn the problem into a business opportunity?….. (read on)
Hedy Lamarr: The movie star, the piano player and the torpedo (and frequency hopping)
Hedy Lamarr was a 1940’s movie star, considered one of the screen’s most beautiful women. But Hedy was more than just good looks and acting skills. Even though many people remembered Hedy for her pithy quote “Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid”, at the outbreak of World War 2 she and composer George Antheil invented an encryption technique for a torpedo radio guidance system! The idea is now used in our mobile networks. (read on)
Alexander Graham Bell: Its good to talk
Suppose you want to send messages as fast as possible. What’s the best way to do it? By light in optical networks, but even then with innovation you can speed things up…(Read on)
Faster fiber
Polina Bayvel and her team have just set a new speed record for sending data over real-world optical cable. They managed to send about 10 times more data than the best commercial services without changing the cable…(read on)
The first Internet concert
Which band was the first to stream a concert live over the Internet? Mick Jagger intended it to be the Rolling Stonesm but it was actually Severe Tire Damage…(read on)
Telecom puzzles
Here are some computational thinking linked puzzles (wordsearch, kriss kross, spot the difference, etc) with a telecom theme …(Read on)
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This blog is funded by EPSRC on grant EP/W033615/1.
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