Who invented the telephone is one of those questions that’s not easy to answer. There were actually lots of people working on the problem. Alexander Graham Bell may have been the first to actually get one to work, or he might not have been. What is clear is that he was the first guy to be awarded a patent, and that made all the difference.
The first telephones were simple things, and would only work between two points, just like those cans on a string you played with as a kid. You needed a telephone at both ends of your private line, and you let someone on the other end know you wanted to talk to them by whistling loudly. Later on, bells were added. However, if you didn’t have ready electricity to run your bells, you had to charge up the bells on the other side with a hand crank on your end. The idea of a network, linking many points through a central hub, wasn’t new with the telephone.The Western Union Telegraph Company had been using networks before the telephone came along.
However, it took time before the telephone moved from being a novelty to an expected and useful tool in every home. It was the simplicity of the device that led to its wide-spread adoption. To operate a telegraph, you had to know Morse code. While the code was sent across the wire, someone at the other end had to write out the dots and dashes before laboriously translating the signals into letters. By comparison, anyone who could hear and speak could use a telephone with the most minimal training.
As the telephone network was expanded, more and more folks could be added to the system. Early phones had batteries in them to power their signals, and these needed periodic replacement.Soon, however, the electric power grid was expanded and the phone network itself began to carry the current necessary to power the telephones. A compact telephone with dial, bells, circuits, and a single hand-held combination of receiver and speaker was released in the 1930s. This device would remain pretty much unchanged until the development of touch-tone phones thirty years later.
It wouldn’t be until 1983 that true hand-held mobile phones would reach the market. The first phones were big, clunky things, requiring the energy of a vehicle to power them, or a
large battery pack to be carried along with the phone. As both electronics and batteries got smaller, so did both the phones and their cost. Today’s phones are easily in the range of most consumers, fit in your pocket, and look more like a calculator from 1983 than an actual telephone of that era.
But phones are still changing as technology marches on. The latest revolution comes in the form of voice over IP, or VOIP as it’s commonly abbreviated. Transmitting voice over packet-switched networks allows you to make phone calls from anywhere you can get a ‘net connection and makes it easy to combine the traditional conversation of the telephone with other information technologies, like databases and video. Using VoIP with modern cellular mobile service allows people to take their digital lives with them, wherever they choose to go.
Photo Credits: Jan Joris Vereijken, smith, Paul Keleher, Alexander O Neill
Telecommuting can feel a bit like the metric system sometimes: everyone tells you it will be the law of the land any day now, and yet it never actually seems to happen. The truth is, lots of people are making it work today, and the technology exists. However, there are some powerful social imperatives that are holding it back.
Probably the strongest hurdle telecommuting has to face is the micro-managing supervisor. Some in middle management seem to assume that any time an employee isn’t being watched like a hawk, they immediately stop doing anything productive and split their time between playing WoW and stealing office supplies. While there probably are folks like that, the fact that they need such strenuous management probably means they cost most than they’re worth, especially in today’s tightening economy. As corporations turn more and more to outsourcing, this sort of resistance to telecommuting gets weaker and weaker. In a world where results matter more than processes, it’s a lot harder to justify in-your-face micromanagement. Besides, employees who never set foot in the office have fewer chances to filch paperclips.
Almost as powerful is the now nearly universal assumption that good people leave their homes every weekday morning to commute to work. It’s a habit ingrained in us since we were kids going to elementary school. It’s the daily migrations of the man in the gray flannel suit. That’s just how the world works. And, for many people, it will continue to work that way. Some jobs just are not suited to telecommuting. Many service sector jobs require face-to-face interactions with customers and clients. But as businesses look for ways to scale back their costs, the obvious savings in building space, computer equipment, and custodial services that come with telecommuting are impossible to ignore. And as the corporate world finally embraces telecommuting out of necessity, their smaller cousins will likely follow suit. Working from home (or, as it was more commonly known, the farm) used to be the way everyone did it. The Industrial Revolution transformed our habits and our assumptions about how “normal” people earned a living. The Digital Revolution will almost certainly follow suit.
Maintaining group cohesion and cooperation is a serious concern, but one that technology has gone a long way to overcoming. Wireless communications and notebooks make it easy to work from anywhere. File-sharing sites like Google Docs can insure that everyone is literally working off the same page. Firewalls are not just for servers these days and software from companies like Symantec and Webroot can keep home desktops and roving laptops safe. A virtual PBX with flexible but robust hunting rules allows you to route customers quickly to the person they need to talk to, even if that person isn’t in some central office. And when you really need some face-to-face time, teleconferencing software with webcams can put everyone anywhere at the conference table.
Finally, there are the personal preferences. Some people just need to get out of the house and honestly enjoy the “water cooler culture”. Being cooped up at home all day is agony for these folks. Luckily for them, entrepreneurs are already ahead of the curve. In addition to the ubiquitous coffee shops and cafes that already cater to the lounge chair business types, we’ve begun to see virtual office centers, locations where you can rent a single office or conference room by the hour, or for long-term arrangements. Not only do these allow you to get out of the house and keep business and family life separate, but they also give you far greater flexibility in choosing who you see every day. Can’t get along with the guy in the next office over? Just rent a different office or move to a new building entirely.
The forces moving us toward telecommuting seem to grow stronger every day. For employees, it’s the need for flexible schedules that better allow juggling work with family, and the always increasing traffic issues that aggravate every commuter. For businesses, telecommuting promises greater control over expenses and happier employees who are more focused on delivering results. The technology is there and the will is growing. Telecommuting is a trend whose time has come.
Online telephony is all the rage and it’s only going to grow. Understanding what all the buzz is about and what it can mean for your business is vital to making the right decisions about your company’s communications needs. So here are our top ten reasons why online telephony destroys the old telecom model:
1. Online telephony requires no on-site equipment. That means you don’t have a hunk of “iron” taking up any space in your facility, and you never need to have telecom employees crawling around your site. And this can be vital if by “facility” you mean the spare bedroom of your home.
2. Because there’s no actual physical hardware on your site, you never need to worry about maintaining or upgrading it. All upgrades, repairs, and software installation is handled invisibly for you.
3. This also means you have the full functionality of your phone system wherever you can log into the ‘net. Redirect your 800 numbers, change you message alerts and download call data from home, at a business convention, or from the comfort of your favorite coffee shop just as easily as you can in the office. In fact you can also change settings and retrieve your voicemail with your phone by simply calling in to your own account.
4. No physical equipment also means it “installs” anywhere. Your system can go live simultaneously across the country. Whether your employees are located at a handful of offices in a single building, or everyone is in a different city, online telephony means you all share one communication system, making it easy to keep in touch and to manage how customers interact with your key talent.
5. Online telephony is cutting edge, not just today but into the future as well. As the world of communications grows, a virtual system can keep pace, adding services and features swiftly and easily.
6. You don’t need any additional employees to take full advantage of an online telephony system. Not only do you not need telecom specialists in your company (who will only tell you why adjusting the system to your needs is more trouble than it’s worth), an online telephony system can eliminate the need for receptionists. Your online telephony system can greet callers and route customers, and the system is flexible enough to adjust whenever you need it to.
7. An online telephony system is flexible. Not only can you set it up in minutes, you can also expand or prune it quickly and easily. You’re never stuck with features or hardware you no longer want (or want to pay for) and adding new offices, locations, or allowing your employees to telecommute is a snap. This allows you to be proactive when it comes to managing your resources, without being tied down to any particular location or equipment.
8. This flexibility allows you to keep your focus on the lifeblood of your business: your customers. Whether you need to open a new office on the other side of the country, adjust how potential clients interact with your organization, or be available for your most important clients twenty-four seven, online telephony makes it possible to adjust quickly and easily, without being tied down to outmoded systems or processes.
9. With a low-risk, pay-as-you-go model, online telephony also makes it easy to control your costs. Since you only pay for as much as you use, you can adjust your communications strategy to free up resources needed elsewhere.
10. And online telephony is already far cheaper than traditional telecom business services. Because there’s no hardware to install or maintain, online telephony doesn’t require companies to maintain fleets of service personnel. The repeatable business process of online telephony means lower subscription costs, offering even small businesses the sort of communications tools that were once only found in the largest companies.
Online telephony dominates traditional telecom because it gives you more for less. Greater flexibility, greater control, and greater oversight, while at the same time reducing the amount of space, personnel and expense your company needs to devote to communications.