The migration of the fundamentally analogue telephone from a circuit switched network to one essential designed for machine communications based on packet switching has not been entirely comfortable. It was not at all obvious that it might work, or indeed, that it might even be possible given the sensitivity of the human ear and mind to artificiality, noise and latency.
After serving humanity for well over 100 years the analogue telephone network and devices have been overtaken by mobile computing devices offering far more facilities and power. So, despite the detailed testing, and charactering of human speech, the design and modelling of device and network abilities, we are saying goodbye to this past.
During to past 40 years a new world has emerge with intelligence and computing power at the edge of networks and not at the core. Layering speech and video on this new ‘internet’ has been a challenge, but now the performance and economics are more than viable. So, in this lecture we trace this history of development and illustrate the tech challenges with a series of audio demonstrations.
In short, we highlight the nature and impact of bandwidth, signal-to-noise ratio, latency, and packet loss through the old analogue to the new digital eras. We also present some ‘off piste’ examples of military and aircraft communications. Throughout we also highlight the key design directions designs, failures and flaws.