Tech that Connects
This article is about the circuits, source-code, services, and people behind the scenes that enable us to call, text, chat, and video conference with today’s increasingly globalized network of friendships, families, colleagues, and workforces. The technology that connects us has many layers.
Some of us may remember when phones were hung on walls, and if you wanted to have a private conversation, sometimes you needed a really long phone cord. Of course, landlines are still very much a thing in 2020, and plenty of people still pick up the phone every day to call loved ones and businesses. Behind the scenes, local phone carriers have been steadily upgrading the copper lines that once defined telephone service, to fiber optic cables that carry both voice and data with ease. After being picked up by cell towers, our mobile phone calls also traverse those same fiber optic networks, meaning our voices are variably changed from sound, to electricity, to light, and back again before reaching the ear of its destination.
As we continue to make the transition from landlines to mobile telephones, the way we communicate with others through the handset is also changing. What was originally a dedicated communications channel for carrying messages between cellular towers, texting has become a mainstay in modern society. Many people, myself included, prefer getting a text over answering an actual phone call. Safe to say, the preference for sending texts through the Short Message Service (SMS) grew, so did the congestion on those dedicated channels. Luckily, Google came along to replace the SMS and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) with the Rich Communication Service (RCS).i Luckily, thus far, there has been hardly a word from end-users in this time of transition, that is to say, RCS may soon be the prevailing standard for texting.
Similar in look and feel to texting, thanks to years of side-by-side development, there exists a plethora of applications for both computers and phones that enable us to chat with one another. Rather than leveraging one’s cellular carrier to exchange messages, as in RCS; applications can take advantage of private and open source code to reliably deliver messages in between two or more parties over the Internet. Now, this may sound a lot like e-mail at first, but applications like WhatsApp, Telegram,ii and Signal,iii are anything but.
Each application encrypts conversations between users to prevent spying on the messages, but each application also does so in a unique way. WhatsApp does not share the code it uses, Telegram’s code is open source and available on just as many platforms as WhatsApp. Signal goes a step further in its message handling capabilities, and can integrate as the default text messaging application for Android phones. Some people claim they don’t trust WhatsApp because it’s owned by Facebook and the source code isn’t public. I find each platform has its own distinct user-base, and reasons from those users as to why one or the other is their favorite chat application. So, I just use them all.
Finally, since we’re in the thick of a pandemic, I think it’s appropriate to being up video chat and video conferences applications. I think I want to be on a video call even less than I’d like to be on a voice call, but the major players still beg mentioning. From the paid side of things, Google Meet,iv Cisco WebExv and Microsoft Teamsvi handle small to large scale video calls and video conferencing. On the free side, we see some of the same applications from above using their individual protocols, as WhatsApp and Signal both have video call features. Again, this information travels encrypted over the Internet. Another Microsoft application, Skype,vii also does free video calls on smaller scales, but can quickly scale up in the paid version, Skype for Business, to easily host one-to-many video conferences.
While we enjoy all these new and exciting ways to communicate with one another by voice, text, or video; I feel we must also give thanks to the coders that write and maintain these applications, the software engineers and hardware architects that build and maintain our telecommunications and Internet infrastructure, and as is the case with Signal, the philanthropists that throw their money behind truly revolutionary open-sourced ideas that can make the world a nicer place to live in. There are more applications than just the ones mentioned here that will allow us to talk, chat, and see one another. I highly suggest that users evaluate each company’s application based on how public their source code is, how often they release updates, and how fast they respond to bugs other people find in their code. In my experience, the more open and responsive a company is with their designs and source code, the higher the quality of their overall product.
