Digital Communications Could Be Described as Being

Digital communications could be described as being borne from the first electronic transmission of words via a wire uttered by Alexander Graham Bell. Those words; "Watson, come here. I want to see you" (American Treasures, 2010) will live on in historical fashion as a changing of not only the manner in which individuals communicate, but the changing of an entire world. From that era to today's digital communication accessibility almost anywhere in the world took nearly 140 years yet advanced society light years into the future.

In today's modern communication modes there are a wide variety of methods for communicating not only the spoken word, but the written word, text, images, pictures, books and entire libraries of information at a press of a button. There are also a number of digital methods for transmission, including but not limited to; TETRA (terrestrial trunked radio), the Internet via Widebrand and Broadband, and a variety of networks used for public and private transmissions. Many of these methods carry more information than Alexander Graham Bell likely ever even imagined. One recent article found that "3G cellular networks can usually handle data rates of several megabits per second" (Evans-Pughe, 2011, p. 75); or in other words, more information in one second can now be transmitted than what the Library of Congress had in its archives during the Bell era.

The rate of transmission and what is being transmitted is an astounding display of man's creativity and the fact that such creativity is not being limited to one nation or region is a reason to feel that one day in the near future, every living human on the planet will have accessibility to every other person on the planet.

A current report shows that China and India "already boast some 500 million Internet users, and we forecast nearly 700 million more will be added by 2015" (Daga, Manuel, Narasimhan, 2010, p. 74).

One could ask what is the draw of digital communications? Besides the obvious instant communication capabilities with loved ones in remote places, some of the other uses include games, streaming video and entertainment. The Daga et al. study determined that "China's digital usage, which is similar to that of the United States, skews toward instant messaging, social networks, gaming, and streaming video" and that "increasingly, Internet users in China are substituting digital media for traditional ones, with the potential for further cannibalization as digital consumption grows" (p. 17). The same study determined that only seven percent (81 million) of India's population currently has access to digital communications. One can only imagine the future growth of communicating digitally with awe and amazement.

It's not only the capacity of digital communications that is mind-boggling, it is also the speed, distance, accuracy and clarity of today's communications network that are astounding as well. Currently there are a number of avenues being examined that may increase the digital capacity even more. One such method is described as a chaotic system; instead of using a linear approach to transmitting data it uses a non-linear (or chaotic) approach. A recent study determined that "this non-linear stable aperiodic characteristic of chaotic communication has numerous features that make it attractive for communication use" (Wren, Yang, 2010, p. 740).

According to the study, some of the advantages of chaotic communication is that it has wideband characteristics, it is resilient against multi-path fading and it is less expensive than the traditional spread spectrum systems.

It is not just the wideband or broadband networks that are receiving attention; new digital transmitting technology can be as simple as an indoor power line. One study found that "Power lines (PLs) may be a cheap and good networking option in the sense that they are almost a universally present infrastructure" (Tiru, Boruah, 2010, p. 287). The study concluded that with slight modifications "cheap telephone receivers will enable even analog signals like voice, temperature and humidity to be transferred and monitored bi-directionally" (p. 291). The researchers also assert that adoption of particular modulation schemes that are immune to noise and use of frequency algorithms over a wide range frequency "will positively improve the performance of the system used" (p. 291).

What the literature seems to portend is that communicating with cousin Youca in remote Russia from a busy downtown intersection in New York City will likely cost less and be much more accessible in the very near future; and that those communications will not necessarily be the shouting into a telephone device but will likely include the ability to see and hear one another as if standing right next to each other.