Ekow Nelson
The first mobile telephone call was made 50 years ago in April 1973.
On Christmas Day 2018, my team made the first 5G voice call in the Middle East over the first commercial 5G network in the UAE. While many others were digging into their roast turkey, we huddled in an old telephone exchange building by the Airport road in Abu Dhabi as we tried valiantly to score another first for the record books. But what else could this new 5G technology be used for?
As with previous generations of mobile technology, the useful application of 5G beyond voice and faster connectivity, remain elusive but it got me thinking about how we as an industry have attempted to tackle two of three remaining barriers to communications: time and distance (space). The third, and possibly the most intractable challenge which emerging Generative AI may well help us crack, is real-time multilingual communications but that is not the subject of this piece. Here is a slightly modified version of what I wrote then.
In years gone by everything was local. The food we ate came from the farm next door, water from the local stream, or river or below the water table under our feet. Our houses were built from local materials and the carpenter was known to us as was the blacksmith who forged local metals. We shopped for essentials in local markets which also doubled as social meeting places.
Today, many of us do not know the source of the food or meat we eat. Our water may be sourced from rivers well beyond our local communities, even imported from natural springs in the hills of Europe or Australia.
We don’t have to visit the local market for our groceries; we purchase them online as we do our books and pretty much anything we need. And we meet on social media and in other virtual hang outs.
The houses we live in may be built by local work men but the materials come from many places. Tiles and ceramics may be from Caltagirione in Sicily (if you can afford them), Windows and doors from Guangzhou in China, furniture from Roche Bois Bois in Paris or Malaysia and roofing from some other part of China.
In the early years of humankind our conversations were limited to those in close proximity to us – neighbours, local communities, friends and family. Even the loudest voice in the neighbourhood got attenuated at some distance. The closest we had to broadcast were sanctioned announcements in public places – ‘dawuro’ in Akan, when a town crier shared an important community announcement like the death of a King or of a muezzin calling Muslims to prayer.
Thanks to communications technology our daily conversations are no longer limited to neighbours; we communicate with family and friends as far apart as Asankragwa and Tokyo through mobile telephony, WhatsApp and social media. Attenuation has been conquered and our ‘voices’ can be heard far and wide.
We see who we are talking to live, regardless of where they are. We can have group discussions much like old community gatherings in villages except the participants can be anywhere in the world. We form and disband groups at will; join and exit others as we please.
The church, mosque or village noticeboards are no longer the main places for public announcements and while muezzins still perform their sacred duty, ‘dawuro’ has become extinct and Town criers are no longer necessary thanks to new media that afford us far better and targeted reach than ever before. Radio (or wireless), the pride of many households of yore, is no longer a transfusion box or gadget but an application accessible from the internet. Gone are the shortwave, longwave radios, 90M Bands and the statics too !
As a kid growing up in Ghana, I would have had to make an astronomically expensive ‘Trunk Call’ to wish you a Happy New Year and even then I could not have done so on a mass scale as I can now with a simple online posting. I may have written you an ‘Air Mail’ letter on one of those blue coloured sheets but it would have taken a few days, possibly a week, to get to any of you from where I am in the desert.
We may not know where the meat on our plate came from but we can track its origins to the farm and cattle that produced it. In short we live locally but we consume and communicate globally.
Much of this transformation has been made possible by advances in communications technology – telephony, broadband, the web etc. With these technologies we have transformed our world beyond recognition, created new possibilities, business, social and behavioural models that were unthinkable only a few years ago.
Underpinning these technologies is the quest to solve two age-old barriers to communications in the physical world: time and distance. Fifty years ago, when the first mobile phone call was made, we opened a new frontier and generations of mobile technology have since built on earlier attempts by broadcast and fixed telephony, to shrink time and distance further.
The first global, mass mobile communication system deployed in the early 1990s was 2G. It allowed us, for the first time, to communicate untethered, from a fixed location outside our homes, unencumbered by wiring. More than that, we could communicate with anyone while on the move.
In the early years, when the idea of talking to another person while on the move without any wiring, was a novelty, mobile telephony was also known as “me gina abonten”. With the 2G revolution we stopped connecting only (fixed) places – strictly speaking, fixed telephony was assigned to households,, offices – and started connecting individuals wherever they were. Whether at home, in the gym, at a friend’s house or in a taxi, anyone could now be reached at the same number regardless of location.
The next generation of communications, 3G, allowed us to use the mobile device for more than voice – we connected to the internet and browsed the web; did emails and even watched some movies. Fourth generation (4G) mobile communications, along with smartphones and their ecosystem of applications spawned a new App economy worth over 6 trillion US Dollars, or 7 percent of global output. Today we live our lives through these devices with an App for everything – from healthcare, fitness, travel, entertainment, retail to digital banking, payments and much else besides.
With 5G, IoT, AI and other advanced technologies, doctors may yet be able to perform surgery on a patient thousands of miles away as we continue to shrink time and space and make the world a smaller and a much better place for all, Inshalla!
To you all at the dawn of a new era in communications with 5G, Happy New Year !
December 2018
Abu Dhabi
reimagining 