telecommunications – Coffee Spoons

Text Me

Well that was a week. Thankfully we all made it to Friday.

Now, your humble author is an old millennial, which means I remember a time before the Facebook and the Whatsapp and the internets. I also remember the first carphones and mobile bricks and flip phones. But what’s stayed consistent amongst all these platforms? It’s the humble old text message. Yep. Those still work. (And your humble author prefers it for his personal communications.) The technical term for a text is SMS. And despite approaching 30 years old, it’s still a widely used channel. If someone has a phone, but they don’t have Facebook? You can text them. No Whatsapp? Text. No Slack? Text. No Teams? Text. No Skype? Text. No whatever? Text.

xkcd recently looked at the ye olde SMS and its perseverance.

I don’t even know what half of these are. Get off my lawn.

And after all that, if you still want to come at me, bro, just text me first.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Phone Calls

It’s Friday, everybody, and that means we all made it to the end of the week.

As a millennial, I was surprised to learn that my mobile can actually be used to make telephonic calls. Phone calls, as they are often known, are like direct messages or text messages, but made without cat gifs or memes. And your voice cannot be filtered. It seems a #primitive way of communicating.

But thanks to xkcd, we can see how, using one person as a sample, the types of these phone calls have varied over the years.

Scammers, politicians, and family, oh my.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Cutting into Cables

Today we look at the cross section of a coaxial cable. It fits into a story from the Wall Street Journal about how some media providers want to be classified as a different type of company so they can gain access to different parts—mainly less congested—of your data service.

Credit for the piece goes to the Wall Street Journal’s graphics department.