3.1C: Advances in Communication Technology

• Mobile phones


  These have become common since their invention in the mid-1990s, even in many developing countries.

  • With smart phones, smart tablets and smart watches in the 2000s extended they information flows to locations beyond landline networks.
  • Reduced mobile phone costs expanded usage from an expensive business tool to an ubiquitous consumer product.
  • Used even in countries with a lack of communications infrastructure. By 2015, 70% of people in Africa owned a mobile phone.
• Internet

  • Internet access became common from the mid 1990s, followed by fast broadband.
  • Close to 50% of the world's population uses internet.
  • Broadband internet in the 1980s and 90s meant that large amounts of data could be moved quickly through cyberspace.
• Social networks

  • Social networks allow people to communicate instantly and without charge (with an internet connection). In 2014, 5 billion Facebook 'likes' were registered each day.
  • The development of social media (Facebook 2006, Instagram 2010, WhatsApp 2010) enabled much cheaper communication between friends and family than landline telephone.
  • This has led to space-time compression, where the cost (time or money) of communicating over distance has fallen rapidly, so people can communicate regardless of distance.
• Economic banking

  • The rise of mobile phones means they can be used for economic banking, revolutionising life for individuals and businesses. In Kenya:
  • The equivalent of one third of the country's GDP is sent through the M-Pesa system annually. This is a mobile phone service that allows credit to be directly transferred between phone users.
  • People in towns and cities use mobiles to make payments for utility bills and school fees.
  • In rural areas, fishermen and farmers use mobiles to check market prices before selling produce.
• ​Fibre-optic cables

  • Land-based and sub-sea fibre optic cables in the 2000s increased the speed and volume of data transmission through cyberspace, and allow instant, global communications.
  • More than 1 million kilometres of flexible undersea cables carry the world's data.
  • Global positioning systems (GPS) use continuously broadcasting satellites as beacons to triangulate information.
  • Delivery vehicles can continuously locate and transmit their position whilst satellite navigation (SATNAV) systems reduce costs from vehicles getting lost.