Get IT Done - Phone IT In

Phone IT In!

Get IT Done

Our lives have been enriched by the development of Information Technology (“IT”). This article will discuss mobile or “personal” phones. Today, everyone carries a mobile phone, and not just in the US, but worldwide. While we all understand the technology in our phones, few know that the telecommunication carriers were the crucible of IT.

Claude Shannon was an MIT graduate who worked for AT&T in the 1940s. Shannon helped replace electromechanical telephone relays with switching circuits to route calls and to use those electrical switches to implement logic. This electrical routing is the fundamental concept that underlies all computing. Shannon also worked to maximize the amount of data that could be sent over copper wires (telephone lines). Shannon invented the field of information theory and is the “Father of Information Technology.”

Before mobile phones, we used phones tied to a physical location. We called from one location to another and asked for the person that we wanted to talk to. They often were not there and, you may have had to speak to someone that you would rather not talk to, e.g., your friend’s mean father or crazy brother. With mobile phones your contacts are always there (as the phone was with them) and they were the only ones to answer the device. It was a personal phone. I believed that the ability to call people instead of locations would explode adoption of mobile phones.

Today, phones are more miniaturized computer than voice service platform. Of course, you can still make a voice call, but I would wager that most of the time on our “phones” is not used to talk. We text, post, scroll, research, listen, watch, and [as noted in the last article] read.

I will confess that I made an unbelievably bad call on the future of texting. I was the VP of IT for Frontier Cellular when texting was enabled by developments in our switching platform. In a meeting to discuss new products, we discussed the potential of “texting.” Understand that we had supported pager texting for years, but that was a business focused market ignored by the public at large. I remember making an impassioned plea to keep focused on our enablement of the era of personal phones and not be sidetracked by the addition of what I saw as consumer paging. History has proven me very, very wrong.

Another serendipitously introduced product was Caller ID. New switch developments enabled the capture and communication of the calling number (later augmented with a lookup of the associated name). We discovered the power of that feature accidentally.

One Friday night, our engineers upgraded the telecommunication switch software. Caller ID was part of the package and was enabled by default. That weekend, caller ID was active on all client devices. On Monday, the engineers identified that the service was on and, as we had not released the feature as a product yet, they turned it off.

Our call center lit up! “Hey, can you please turn that phone number displaying thing on again?” We quickly created a “calling feature bundle” for $1 per month. When your phone is always with you it becomes valuable for you to know if you want to take this call. Everyone was willing to pay the fee and an extra $1 per month from a half-million clients was substantial revenue.

Today your phone integrates those features with your contacts, ringtones and more. They communicate with radio towers and GPS satellites to help us navigate and prevent us from being lost (a perennial fear of humans). Phone it in using the IT in your phone.

get IT done

And Think About IT!

Tony Keefe, COO, Entre Computer Services www.entrecs.com

APRIL 2022 The ROCHESTER ENGINEER | 13