Fernando Alcoforado*
This article aims to present the communications revolutions that have taken place throughout human history from writing in prehistory to the contemporary era with the advent of the 5G Internet. Communication arose from the human being’s need to pass information to each other. The first forms of communication took place through signals, gestures and sounds, then came, in order, writing, mail, newspaper, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computer, cell phone and the internet as means of communication. Means of communication are tools that enable communication between individuals through the transfer of information individually or in mass. The means of communication are tools that made it possible to expand communication between individuals, enabling the dissemination of information. These means of communication have been undergoing several transformations throughout human history and accelerating the dissemination of information.
Writing, as a means of communication, meant the use of codes and signals to transmit information between human beings, having emerged from the first records of drawings (rock paintings) in caves, dated to 15,000 BC and other records found in various parts of the world, such as hieroglyphics in Egypt and letters engraved in bas-relief on ceramic tiles. Mail is one of the oldest means of communication whose system involves sending letters, documents and parcels between sender and recipient. The papyrus found at Hibeh, dated 255 BC, contains information on how the Egyptian messenger service was organized. In China, in the Sung dynasty (960-1276 CE), postal workers were messengers on foot and messengers on horseback. When domination of the mongols (thirteenth and fifteenth centuries), according to Marco Polo’s sources, there were close to 10,000 post offices and the knight service had 200,000 horses at its disposal. The Cretans and Phoenicians also developed a postal communication system and were the first to use pigeons and swallows as messengers.
Historians attribute the invention of the newspaper to the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar. Acta Diurna was an official publication of the Roman Empire, created in the year 59 BC during the imperial government of Julius Caesar. She brought daily news to the population from all corners of the Empire (and beyond) talking mainly of military conquests, science and politics. The telegraph, which allows communication through Morse code, was created in 1835 by Samuel Morse, in the United States. The telegraph is a communication device that uses electricity to send coded messages over wires. In the mid-19th century, it was the fastest way to communicate at a distance. The telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, is an electro-acoustic means of communication that enables the transmission of information through voice and sound signals. The invention of the telephone happened accidentally to improve the transmissions of the telegraph, which has very similar structural concepts. With the telegraph, however, it was possible to transmit only one message at a time. Graham Bell saw the possibility of transmitting more than one message along the same wire at once in the “multiple telegraph” concept.
Parallel to the discovery of the telephone, radio transmission appeared. Radio is a communication vehicle based on the diffusion of sound information through electromagnetic waves at different frequencies. It is considered the most popular medium and the most capable of mass communication worldwide. The history of radio began with Michael Faraday, who, in 1831, discovered magnetic induction. But the beginning of radio phonic propagation even came in 1887, through Henrich Rudolph Hertz. The first radio company was founded in London, by the Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi, in 1896, with the emission and reception of wireless signals. The following year, Oliver Lodge invented the tuned electrical circuit, which made it possible to change the tune by selecting the desired frequency. Television, conceived since the 19th century and developed in the 1920s by the Scotsman John L. Baird and the Russian Wladmir Zworykin, is an electronic means of communication capable of instantly reproducing images and audio, converting light and sound into electromagnetic waves.
The first large-scale electronic computer, developed without mechanical or hybrid parts, only appeared in 1945, after World War II. Some say that it was Charles Babbage who created, in the 19th century, an analytical machine that, roughly speaking, is compared to today’s computer with memory and programs. With this invention, Babbage is considered the “father of Informatics”. Although many Babbage concepts are used today, the formalization of components, which would become a general-purpose machine and new abstractions, were only consolidated from the 1930s onwards, thanks to John Von Neumann, one of the ENIAC developers, and to Alan Turing. The cell phone is a means of communication that transmits voice and data through electromagnetic waves. It was invented in 1947 by the Bell technology company in the United States. In 1956, Ericsson launched a cell phone model that, from then on, other companies, such as Motorola, started to create cell phones. In 2007, the mobile device underwent a major transformation with the launch of a smartphone without number pads by Apple. Currently, cell phones are one of the most used means of communication in the world to make calls, store data and transmit individual and mass information. This was only possible with the creation of the means of communication that revolutionized the world, the Internet.
The Internet is, without a doubt, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Since it appeared, it has opened the doors to new technological developments that continue to advance until today, transforming the way we live and interact. Today, living without the Internet is simply unthinkable. 40 years ago, computers were large machines that performed calculations and stored information. In general, its use had exclusively scientific and governmental purposes. The breakthrough in Internet history came in 1965, when Lawrence G. Roberts, Massachusetts, and Thomas Merrill, California, connected a computer over a low-speed switched telephone line. The experiment was a success and is marked as the event that created the first WAN (Wide Area Network) in history. The history of the Internet continued in 1966, when Lawrence G. Roberts joined DARPA and created the ARPANET plan to develop the first packet-switched network. Although the first prototype of a decentralized packet-switched network had already been designed by the UK’s National Physics Laboratory (NPL) in 1968, it would only gain visibility in 1969, when a University of California (UCLA) computer successfully connected to another from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The connection was so successful that, months later, four American universities were already interconnected. Thus was born ARPANET.
By 1970, ARPANET was consolidated with hundreds of computers connected. S. Crocker and his team established the control protocol called Network Control Protocol (NCP), which allowed the development of applications from computers connected to the ARPANET. In 1972, Ray Tomlinson created basic email software, which became the most important application of the decade and changed the nature of communication and collaboration between people. Its impact was so great that ARPANET gradually moved away from its primitive military use to have scientific use in the dissemination of information. For this reason, in 1974, more than 50 American universities were connected to ARPANET. Despite its success, the NCP protocol was not sufficient to communicate with networks or machines outside the ARPANET, such as packet radio or satellite networks. Therefore, in 1974 Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf developed a new version of the protocol that responded to an open architecture network environment. In the early 1980s, ARPANET changed the NCP protocol to the new TCP/IP. IP had become the carrier of the Global Information Infrastructure. The TCP/IP protocol facilitated communication between networks without the need for them to make changes to their interface. In addition, it ensured that no packets of information were lost and verified that they arrived in the order in which they were sent. In 1985, the Internet was already consolidated as the main communication network with a global reach.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web (WWW) to facilitate collaborative work. Basically, the WWW works as an interconnected hypertext document distribution system (HTTP) accessible through a web browser connected to the Internet. The system became so popular that in 1991 it was opened to the outside public. This was possible thanks to the creation of the Mosaic browser in 1993. In fact, its reception was so fast that in 1997 there were more than 200 thousand websites. With the advent of TCP/IP, individual, educational and commercial networks began to have access to the almost immediate communication and available information offered by the Internet. Connectivity is no longer exclusive and has become available to everyone thanks to the WWW. Thus, the Internet became part of all spheres of society, including commercial activities. Internet commerce led to the development of private network services with TCP/IP, which caused, among other things, the emergence of distance education and e-commerce, the transition from traditional marketing to digital marketing.
The Internet has changed radically since its inception. It is no longer a space where emails are exchanged and information is stored. The Internet has evolved significantly over time. In 1979, the first generation of mobile communication networks (1G Internet) was implemented in Japan, whose data transmission was done in an analog way, that is, through waves with variable frequency, which only allowed communication by audio, the traditional phone call. This was the first network signal available for cell phones, responsible for allowing wireless connections. The quality of the calls was lower because of the variation in wave size. Ten years later, the second generation (2G Internet) was launched, now with a digital signal that, in addition to increasing the security of communications, enabled the sending of SMS (English, Short Messaging Service, text-only messages), and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service messages, for images and videos). The main attractions of this connection were security, the ability to make more simultaneous calls and the integration of services such as SMS messaging and data transmission between devices, such as the FAX.
The real inflection point in how to use mobile communications, however, came with the third generation (3G Internet). The transmission rates – technical name of what we colloquially call “internet speed” – of 3G were so much higher than 2G that with it was possible to upload videos on the spot, play online games, make video calls and interact in real time on social networks, all with the use of the cell phone. This technology paved the way for the launch of the iPhone 3G in 2008, marking the opening of the smartphone era. 3G Internet is an evolution of the 2G network, supporting even more voice calls and data exchange on the same frequency, in addition to having a lower operating cost. In practice, 3G Internet was the first real mobile Internet, as its transmission was the fastest ever. The 4G Internet arrived to show that it was possible to do even more. This new connection in which each connected device is identified with a different address, brought a speed of 100Mbps in motion and 1Gbps at rest. Its differential in relation to the others is that, in addition to speed, it allows a greater number of connected users without losing signal quality. The calculation is that its speed is four to 100 times faster than that of 3G Internet. Another point is that the 4G connection prioritizes data traffic — be it audio, text, video, photo — and not voice traffic, common in 3G.
A new revolution in the means of communication is about to take place with the use of the 5G Internet around the world, representing the greatest advance in communications so far after a long historical process of technological evolution. The 5G Internet combines performance gains in several aspects. In addition to improving the overall functioning of the internet on mobile devices, it enables previously unthinkable applications, including the mass adoption of cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous vehicles. The main performance gains appear in four characteristics of the network: 1) very high transmission rates (download and upload speed); 2) high network reliability (ability of the network to continue working when there is a failure in a part of it); 3) latency close to 0 (reduction of time between sending a command and returning the result of that command from 200ms to 1ms, exactly one thousandth of a second); and, 4) high network capacity (a 100-fold increase compared to the 4G Internet in the amount of information that can pass through it at the same time). With this, it will no longer only be cell phones and computers that will be connected to the internet, but also products of all types that will be connected to each other and in the cloud, creating what is known as the Internet of Things.
It is important to note that after the creation of the WWW in 1989, the launch of Google in 1997 was another giant leap in Internet history. Google has taken this network to a wide audience. Today, Google works as a browser and search engine, counting with almost a billion indexed pages and offering easy access to information thanks to its algorithms. Social media was also a big thing, as was Google. Facebook is one of the most successful cases of Internet application as a means of communication and information, providing access to news and allowing people to communicate in real time. Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, among others, also emerged as means of communication. YouTube represents another breakthrough in the history of the Internet, showing that it serves as an entertainment medium, eventually replacing traditional media such as television or radio. Now the Internet is everywhere, as the emergence of the Internet of Things shows us. The Internet triggered the Fourth Industrial Revolution, leading the world to settle in the Information Age. In fact, Internet 2.0 is already being treated as a new stage that will allow users to go from being just spectators to interacting and collaborating with each other as content creators.
5G Internet will have huge impacts on the economy and society. It is not just an incremental evolution from the previous generation, the 4G Internet. It is not a technology that only operates with transmission speeds higher than 4G. It is an absolutely innovative communications platform with features that allow machine-to-machine (M2M) communication with great efficiency, effectiveness, reliability and security. In this sense, it is developed for the internet of things (IoT), that is, for personal applications, but it also serves as a communications platform for the development of new and revolutionary applications for industry, cities, agriculture, transport and the services. The 5G Internet will be a great driver for the development of Industry 4.0 and the advent of smart cities because it tends to accelerate the development of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and machine learning whose potential will not only consist in improving connectivity for people, but allow communication between objects, which can decisively transform urban services and spaces. The disruptive power of the new 5G network will allow an industrial technological leap with significant changes in production modes and in business modeling with Industry 4.0.
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* Fernando Alcoforado, 81, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018), Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019) and A humanidade ameaçada e as estratégias para sua sobrevivência (Editora Dialética, São Paulo, 2021) .
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