We Communicate in Ways Never Before Imagined
On November 9th, the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Let’s look astoundingly at how our world has changed since 1989. We are communicating in ways never before imagined. To experience this in our lifetime is remarkable. To think about bandwidth and network requirements to meet our insatiable demand for voice, data, video, and the web, is mind-boggling. Remarkably, as far as these technologies advance us, some parts of the world still face hurdles to be a part of this communication phenomenon.
1989 The Fall of the Berlin Wall
1990 The World (world.std.com) comes online and is the first public dialup Internet Service Provider; Email is the killer app of the 90’s
1994 Bluetooth technology is invented
1995 America Online provides Internet access; registration of domain names is no longer free; 25Million cell phone users in the U.S.; 30M Users on the World Internet;Newcomers eBay and Amazon are online
1996 Browser war between Netscape and Microsoft, rushes in a new age of software development;
- Some countries place restrictions on the Internet
- China: requires users and ISPs to register with the police
- Germany: cuts off access to some newsgroups carried on CompuServe
- Saudi Arabia: confines Internet access to universities and hospitals
- Singapore: requires political and religious content providers to register withthe state
- New Zealand: classifies computer disks as “publications” that can be censored and seized
Other countries register names online for the first time: Qatar (QA), Syria (SY), Aruba (AW), Cambodia (KH), Bosnia-Herzegovina (BA), Maldives (MV), Rwanda (RW), Yemen (YE), Zaire (ZR)
1997 America Online is one of the first to launch Instant Messaging (AIM)
1998 Dotcom boom takes off
1999 BlackBerry® launches
2001 Afghanistan’s Taliban bans Internet access country-wide; Forwarding email in Australia becomes illegal with the passing of the Digital Agenda Act, as it is seen as a technical infringement of personal copyright
2003 Skype is founded; SQL slammer worm spreads world-wide in 10 minutes
2004 Broadband services make a splash in the market; Facebook is founded
2005 YouTube created
2006 Cisco TelePresence video conferencing introduced; Twitter is born
2007 45M Wi-Fi Users worldwide
2008 Mobile broadband PC and embedded cards topped $4.1 billion worldwide; Sprint announces first 3G/4G dual–mode mobile broadband service;
2009 China blocks access to social media sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube; 60% of the world has access to mobile phones; U.S. domestic airlines equip planes with Wi-Fi access; Top 10 Countries with Wi-Fi Hotspots: United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Canada, France, Netherlands, and Chile
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which once stood to separate people, we are now connecting with one another across the globe in an instant, in ways never before imagined.
Sources: http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/; http://www.wi-fi.org/knowledge_center_overview.php; http://www.bluetooth.com/Bluetooth/Fast_Facts.htm, http://www.cellular-news.com/story/36568.php
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