Ramblings | DOT-DASH TO DOT.COM

There’s Nothing that a Wompom Cannot Do!

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Andrew

Flanders and Swann used to sing an amusing song about the Wompom – an imaginary animal / vegetable hybrid with an amazing range of properties. This song, which is still available on iTunes, often comes to mind when I’m reading about the latest “wonder material”: Graphene.

Graphene was discovered by two researchers at the University of Manchester (Kostya Novoselov and Andre Geim) while attempting to construct a transistor out of graphite. They needed to produce a sheet of graphite that was as thin as possible, and their method was astonishingly simple – they simply suck a flake of graphite on a piece of sticky tape, folded the tape over and them pulled it apart. To their astonishment, they found that this process sometimes produced slivers of graphite that were just one atom thick. Even more amazingly, these films of graphite turned out to be mechanically stable. It was the thinnest material that had ever been produced. As in the case of the Wompom:

You can ice it, You can dice it,
You can pare it, You can slice it

Graphene

Graphene is harder than diamond and three hundred times stronger than steel, yet it is incredibly flexible and the world’s best conductor of electricity.

Now the thick inner shell of a Wompom
You can mould with a finger and thumb.
Though soft when you began it
It’ll set as hard as granite
And it’s quite as light as aluminium

There is such an extraordinary range of potential uses for grapheme that there isn’t space to list them all here. However, to avoid diverging too far from the theme of this blog, some uses that may have an impact on telecoms include much faster integrated circuits, spray-on solar panels, massively increased battery capacities and lower cost displays that are simpler to recycle.

So we make what we like from the Wompom,
And that proves very useful indeed.
From streets full of houses
To the buttons on your trousers
With a Wompom you have everything you need.

With apologies to my younger readers who may never have heard of Flanders and Swann.

Posted in Telecom Ramblings | Tagged Andre Geim, Graphene, Kostya Novoselov, telecoms, University of Manchester | Leave a comment

Time for Unconventional Thinking

Posted on September 13, 2013 by Andrew

I recently published a white paper describing some unconventional threats to utility infrastructure. In addition to rather unusual (but potentially devastating) threats such as coronal mass ejections from the sun, electromagnetic pulses and space debris, the paper also talks about threats to utility infrastructure from cyber warfare and cyber terrorism. If you think that power grids, water networks, railways and airports are not vulnerable to such threats – then you had better read the white paper!

Since that paper was written, there has been a cyber attack on Istanbul Airport’s passport control system. Airports are massive users of IT, and it’s heavily interconnected, so this attack surely demonstrates the very real possibility that an airport could be shut down by a cyber attack. At the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last July, Trend Micro threat researcher Kyle Wilhoit demonstrated that critical utility infrastructure is not only vulnerable to attacks, but has already been targeted – with power grids and water plants being particularly vulnerable. Just recently, the BBC devoted an episode of their “Click” technology program to the same issue. Utilities may not be particularly exciting, but life without them would be very difficult indeed.

Cyber Security

Of course, utilities are fully aware of their responsibilities. However, there can sometimes be a focus on threats that have been a problem in the past rather than those that might be a problem in the future. Furthermore, disaster recovery plans are often based on the implicit assumption that damage is constrained to one system or one geographical area. The white paper challenges such comfortable assumptions.

The tendency of technologies to build on other technologies means that the failure of something like the electricity grid or the GPS system can create a domino effect that spreads far beyond the original problem. It was the failure to recognise systemic risks in a highly-interconnected system that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008. As was the case with the banks in 2008, many disaster recovery plans are likely to be of little or no value when confronted with new or unusual threats – such as those discussed in the white paper.

Posted in Telecom Ramblings | Tagged cyber terrorism, cyber warfare, DOT-DASH TO DOT.COM, infrastructure, Internet, telecoms, utility, World Wide Web | Leave a comment

The Extraordinary Power of Mathematics

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Andrew

Modern physics is increasingly dominated by “big science” projects such as the Large Hadron Collider. However, it is refreshing to know that mathematics can enable a lone genius to make earth-shattering discoveries using nothing more sophisticated than a notepad and pen. Two of the greatest exponents of this art were James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein.

James Clerk Maxwell

Albert Einstein

James Clerk Maxwell suggested the existence of radio waves as early as the mid-1860’s. Starting from earlier work on electricity and magnetism by Michael Faraday and others, Maxwell produced a set of mathematical equations that describe the behaviour of electric and magnetic fields and their interaction with matter. Using these equations, Maxwell was able to show that oscillating electric and magnetic fields should be able to travel through empty space, and that they should be reflected and refracted in the same way as light. Indeed, Maxwell calculated that the velocity of these fields through empty space would be very close to the known speed of light, leading him to speculate that light itself might be a form of electromagnetic wave. Since electromagnetic waves were not constrained to oscillate at any particular frequency, he suggested that there might be a whole spectrum of electromagnetic radiation of which visible light was just one small part.

However, Maxwell’s equations suggested that the speed of light would be the same for all observers. This was in direct contravention to Newtonian physics, and it was something that deeply troubled the young Albert Einstein forty years later. In 1905, Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity which overcame this difficulty and showed that Maxwell was right. Two months later, he published a follow-up paper that contained one of the most famous equations in physics: E=mc². In 1931, on the hundredth anniversary of Maxwell’s birth, Einstein described Maxwell’s work as the “most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton”. That’s VERY high praise!

These issues may seem a bit esoteric, but the theoretical work of Maxwell and Einstein has extremely important implications in the real world of telecommunications. The discovery of radio waves by Heinrich Hertz – which came directly from an attempt to test Maxwell’s theoretical predictions – continues to provide new and improved methods of mobile and wireless communication. On the other hand, Einstein’s revelations about the speed of light still place a fundamental (and extremely frustrating) limit on the speed at which we can communicate information. I sincerely hope that the increasing emphasis on huge and massively- expensive projects like the Large Hadron Collider will not rule out major advances being made by a lone genius armed with nothing more expensive than a notebook and pen.

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Two Cheers for the Smartphone

Posted on March 1, 2013 by admin

I recently bought my first smartphone. You might find it surprising that someone who works in the telecommunications industry and has an obvious interest in technology should be such a late adopter of this almost-ubiquitous technology. Let me explain.

When I was young, I had a penknife that included a device for removing stones from a horse’s hoof. It also included a saw that could cut small branches off trees and a screwdriver designed for very large screws. I never once used any of these “features”, yet the additional metalwork that they required meant that the penknife was constantly wearing holes in my pocket.

In the 1980’s, the Filofax became a fashionable business accessory. The concept was subsequently developed by products such as the Time Manager – a heavy, leather-bound tome that required a 3-day training course to learn how to drive it. I was initially a very enthusiastic user, but it subsequently dawned on me that I was only really using a handful of pages and that much of the information that I was carrying around really belonged in a filing system. It was a merciful release when the Time Manager was stolen and I could replace it with something much lighter and smaller that dispensed with the unnecessary baggage.

My views on the smartphone have been influenced by these experiences. For years, I have carried around a Nokia candybar phone that did all the things I wanted it to do – make phone calls, send texts, synchronise with my Outlook contacts and calendar, take photographs and (very occasionally) surf the web. The mechanical keypad was far less fiddly to use that a touchscreen, and the battery life was the envy of my smartphone-using colleagues. Furthermore, the phone was small enough to carry in a discrete leather holder on my belt, whilst the average smartphone is too big to be carried conveniently unless you wear a jacket or use a handbag. The only feature that was missing from my candybar phone was a navigation application to help me find my way around unfamiliar cities, and candybar phones are certainly capable of supporting excellent navigation apps.

Which is better?

But the world has moved on, and the market has decided that business users need smartphones. I can’t say that I have learned to love my smartphone, but the initial feelings of contempt that we had for each other have given way to sullen acceptance. I have to admit that the smartphone has some useful capabilities for people (like me) who have to travel regularly, but none of them comes anywhere close to being a “killer application”. Many of the pre-loaded applications have now been deleted from my smartphone, and the few that I have added have been to improve basic functionality such as synchronisation and the keyboard. I may feel differently in a year’s time, but for now I can’t manage more than two cheers for the smartphone. However, I know that many people disagree with me, and the committed devotion to smartphones that I witness all around me makes me nervous that I may be missing something. Comments (or counselling) via the contact form on the right would be much appreciated.

PS: I see that Nokia have just launched a candybar phone that supports basic functionality (phone calls, text messaging) and costs just £13. Since it’s not running any unnecessary apps, it can last for 35 days on a single charge! The Independent commented that it will “surely attract western smart phone users who, despite enjoying the high-tech apps and features of their more expensive devices, regularly complain of unpredictable battery drain leaving a fully charged phone dead in well-under 24 hours. Complex apps and functions causing crashes and requiring resets are also a common reliability problem with many top-selling devices. As a result, an increasing number of smart phone users are opting to carry cheap and technologically basic ‘back-up phones’. These simple devices can be better relied on not to crash in an emergency, and their relative lack of features means battery life is usually days not hours.” Perhaps my views are more mainstream than I thought.

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Is Anybody Out There?

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Andrew

I’ve recently been reading a book by John Gribbin about the possibility of life in other parts of our galaxy. The title – Alone in the Universe – makes it pretty clear what the answer is going to be, but the reasoning by which Gribbin arrives at this answer is fascinating.

Is Anybody Out There? Source: NASA

On the first anniversary of this blog, it seems an appropriate moment to ask a similar question: Is there anybody out there? Of course, I know that there are people out there reading this blog because some of you have been kind enough to tell me so. However, I’m not getting much feedback, so I’m wondering whether my posts are missing their target. Are they too dull, too technical or simply addressing the wrong subjects? Or is it just that some of you are a bit apathetic? I’ve got plenty of ideas for new blog posts, but have you got any better suggestions?

So please, Dear Reader, take a moment to use the Contact Me form on this website to send me some feedback. Alternatively, you can use the Leave a Reply form at the end of each blog post. I don’t mind constructive criticism, and I’m looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Posted in Telecom Ramblings | Tagged DOT-DASH TO DOT.COM, ramblings blog, telecoms | Leave a comment

Noises in the Earth

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Andrew

The early telegraph pioneers encountered major problems with cables, so there was a strong incentive for them to minimise the amount of cabling required. Fortunately, the use of an “earth return” meant that one wire (rather than two) was sufficient to carry a telegraph circuit between two locations. A good electrical connection to earth was required at each end of the line to provide the return path for the telegraph circuit, and this could be achieved by connecting to a lump of metal that was buried in damp ground or submerged in a stream.

The idea of an earth return is often surprising to people who have not encountered it before. We tend to expect electrical conductors to be made from metals such as copper, and the surface of the Earth is not noticeably metallic. Certainly, if a copper wire is replaced with an equivalent volume of wet soil, the result would probably turn out to be a rather poor conductor of electricity. However, the Earth is a very large lump of matter, so the return path is made up of a huge number of separate electrical paths; since these paths are connected in parallel, they combine to produce a low resistance path.

The diagram below, which comes from Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 telephone patent, shows that he anticipated that the telephone would use an earth return in the same way as the telegraph had done (Boxes E and g represent connections to earth at the transmitter and receiver respectively).

Diagram from Bell Telephone Patent

However, early telephone users found that noise on the line was a major problem. This graphic description comes from a history of the telephone written by Herbert N. Casson in 1910:

“Noises! Such a jangle of meaningless noises had never been heard by human ears. There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming. There were the rustling of leaves, the croaking of frogs, the hissing of steam, and the flapping of birds’ wings. There were clicks from telegraph wires, scraps of talk from other telephones, and curious little squeals that were unlike any known sound. The lines running east and west were noisier than the lines running north and south. The night was noisier than the day, and at the ghostly hour of midnight, for what strange reason no one knows, the babel was at its height.”

After considerable experimentation, it was found that the noise was caused by the use of an earth return. Since the telephone was an analogue device, it was far more vulnerable than the telegraph to electrical noise. Telephone engineers were eventually forced to the conclusion that, despite the huge additional cost, the only way to build a satisfactory telephone network would be to use conventional wires for both halves of each circuit.

Posted in Telecom Ramblings | Tagged 19th century, Alexander Graham Bell, earth return, Samuel Morse, telegraph, telephone | Leave a comment

The Victorians were Rocked to their Socks

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Andrew

Methods of communicating over long distances advanced surprisingly little from the days of the Roman Empire to the start of the nineteenth century. Although beacons and semaphores were occasionally used, the speed at which information could be transmitted was typically limited by the speed at which a horse could gallop or a ship could sail. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that the development of the electric telegraph in the middle of the 19th Century had a massive impact on Victorian society.

A magazine article published in the United States in 1873 gives a rather breathless account of the range of applications for the new invention:

“Every phase of the mental activity of the country is more or less represented in this great system. The fluctuations in the markets; the price of stocks; the premium on gold; the starting of railroad trains; the sailing of ships; the arrival of passengers; orders for merchandise and manufactures of every kind; bargains offered and bargains closed; sermons, lectures and political speeches; fires, sickness and death; weather reports; the approach of the grasshopper and the weevil; the transmission of money; the congratulations of friends – every thing, from the announcement of a new planet down to an enquiry for a lost carpet-bag, has its turn in passing the wires.”
Harpers New Monthly Magazine, 1873.

Bentworth Telegraph Office (Hants, UK) c1905

Today, it is hard for us to recognise just how different the telegraph was from anything that had gone before it. Although professionals were quick to grasp the potential benefits of the telegraph for business and commerce, many ordinary individuals found it hard to understand how communication was possible without the physical transfer of a piece of paper. One elderly lady refused to accept a telegram from her son because she was sure that it was not his handwriting on the form. People would hand in messages to be transmitted, and then watch the telegraph wires to see if they could see their message as it was sent on its way. Once it became possible to transfer money by telegraph from one place to another, people believed that notes and coins were being physically transmitted, and they started turning up at telegraph offices with other small objects that they wished to send by telegraph.

Posted in Telecom Ramblings | Tagged 19th century, communications, DOT-DASH TO DOT.COM, electric telegraph, history, telegraph | Leave a comment

Concerns about Copper

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Andrew

The high price of copper on world markets has led to a spate of cable thefts, and this has provided telephone companies with a strong incentive to find cost-effective ways of replacing copper telephone wire with optical fibre. However, this is not the first time that telecoms engineers have had to look for alternatives to copper wire.

Surprising as it may seem, early telephone wires were made of galvenised iron or steel in spite of the fact that these metals are poor conductors of electricity. The ideal telephone wire would have been made from silver or copper, but silver was much too expensive and copper was too weak to support its own weight. Fortunately, in 1877 Thomas Doolittle developed a process to increase the tensile strength of copper wire by drawing it through a series of dies, thereby making it strong enough for use on telephone lines. The new wire was deployed in various parts of the USA to assess its performance in different climates, and it proved to be a great success. Writing in 1910, Herbert Casson observed that

“.. there has been little trouble with copper wire, except its price. It was four times as good as iron wire, and four times as expensive. Every mile of it, doubled, weighed two hundred pounds and cost thirty dollars. On the long lines, where it had to be as thick as a lead pencil , the expense seemed to be ruinously great. When the first pair of wires was strung between New York and Chicago, for instance, it was found to weigh 870,000 pounds–a full load for a twenty-two-car freight train; and the cost of the bare metal was $130,000. So enormous has been the use of copper wire since then by the telephone companies, that fully one-fourth of all the capital invested in the telephone has gone to the owners of the copper mines.”

Casson, Herbert N, The History of the Telephone, A. C. McClurg & Co, Chicago, 1910, Chapter 4.

Modern Copper Telephone Cable

Posted in Telecom Ramblings | Tagged 19th century, cable, communications, copper, telecoms, telegraph, telephone | Leave a comment

Computer Bloke stars in Olympics Opening Ceremony

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Andrew

One of the more bizarre moments in the recent opening ceremony for the Olympic Games occurred when the spotlight fell on a bloke sitting at a desk in front of a computer. Commentators on certain American television channels were unable to explain who he was or why he was there. However, viewers with a telecoms or IT background might have recognised him as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

In the early 1990’s, Berners-Lee was working at the CERN atomic research centre near Geneva. As he later recalled:

“The real world of high-energy physics was one of incompatible networks, disk formats, data formats, and character-encoding schemes, which made any attempt to transfer information between computers generally impossible.”

In order to gain maximum benefit from the results of the hugely expensive experiments being conducted at CERN, there was a need to store and present information in a way that overcame the incompatibilities between different computers. Email was a well established method of passing information from one computer to another, but it did not provide a public space in which information could be immediately presented to anyone who asked for it. Furthermore, email did not provide any mechanism for linking together related pieces of information to guide the user towards data that they were looking for.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee hit upon the idea of using hypertext to provide these linkages. Hypertext was not a new idea. The index used in a printed book can be considered to be a form of hypertext, and hypertext had already been used to provide cross-references within electronic documents. However, Berners-Lee was the first person to apply the idea to a computer network. Using hypertext, it would be possible to link text in one document to related text in another document – irrespective of where the two documents were stored on the network. As Michael Dertouzos, the Director of the MIT Computer Science Laboratory, subsequently commented:

“Thousands of computer scientists had been staring for two decades at the same two things – hypertext and computer networks. But only Tim conceived of how to put those two elements together to create the Web.”

Posted in Telecom Ramblings | Tagged ARPANET, computer, DOT-DASH TO DOT.COM, Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web, www | Leave a comment

The First Mobile Phone?

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Andrew

In 1879, Professor David Hughes noticed that a clicking noise occurred in his home-made telephone whenever he used his induction balance. Hughes eventually found that the induction balance had a loose contact, and that the clicking went away when the contact was fixed. He correctly deduced that radio waves were emanating from sparks at the loose contact. Hughes devised a clockwork device to generate the sparks at regular intervals, thereby producing a regular clicking noise in the telephone handset.

When he found that these clicks could be heard all round his house, he set off down Great Portland Street in London with the telephone held to his ear. As he later recalled, “the sounds seemed to slightly increase for a distance of 60 yards, then gradually diminish, until at 500 yards I could no longer with certainty hear the transmitted signals”. This incident occurred just three years after Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone, and it has been claimed by some to be the first ever use of a mobile phone!

David Hughes

The discovery was demonstrated to members of the Royal Society in February 1880, but they dismissed it as unimportant. Hughes was so discouraged that he did not even publish the results of his work, and the credit for these discoveries went to others. However, David Hughes gained the recognition that he deserved in many other areas, and further details of his remarkable achievements can be found on Wikipedia.

Posted in Telecom Ramblings | Tagged 19th century, Alexander Graham Bell, David Hughes, mobile, radio, telephone | Leave a comment

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