Satellites and Telecommunications

Our world is becoming an increasingly complex place in which, we are very dependent on other people and organizations. An event in some distant part of the globe can rapidly and significantly affect the quality of life in our home country.

This increasing dependence, on both a national and international scale, forced us to create systems that can respond immediately to dangers, enabling appropriate defensive or offensive actions to be taken. These systems are operating all around us in military, civil, commercial and industrial fields.

A worldwide system of satellites has been created and it is possible to transmit signals around the globe by bouncing them from one satellite to an earth station and then to another satellite and soon.

Originally designed to carry voice messages, they are able to carry hundreds of thousands of separate simultaneous calls. These systems are being adopted to provide for business communications, including the transmission of voice and facsimile messages, data and video data.

It is probable that future wide use of satellites in the area of telecommunications will provide a great variety of information services to transmit directly into our homes, possibly including personalized electronic mail. The electronic computer is at the heart of many such systems, but the role of telecommunications is not less important- There will be a further convergence between the technologies of computing and telecommunications. The change of this kind will lead us to the database culture, the cashless society, the office at home, the gigabit-per-second data network.

One cannot doubt that the economic and social impact of these concepts will be very significant. Already, advanced systems of communication are affecting both the layman and the technician.

The new global satellite-communication systems offer three kinds of service.

The first one is voice messages. Satellite telephones are able to make calls from anywhere on the? Earth to anywhere else. That makes them especially useful to use in remote, third-world villages (some of which already use stationary satellite telephones), for explorers. Today's mobile phones depend on earth-bound transmitters, whose technical standards vary from country to country. Satellite telephones can solve this problem, but it is not a cheap service.

The second service is messaging. Satellite messages have the same global coverage as satellite telephones, but carry text alone, which is extremely useful for those with laptop computers. As we see, the Internet works in space too. The only problem for ordinary users is one-way transmissions. This problem is solved by using combine transmissions, when you make a call using land communications and receive ordered information through your satellite plate.

The third service is tracking. Voice and messaging systems also tell their users where they are to within a few hundred meters. Combined with the messaging service, the location service could help rescue teams, to find lost adventurers, the police to find stolen cars, exporters to follow the progress of cargoes and so on. Satellite systems provide better positioning information to anyone who has a receiver for their signals.

To my thinking, satellite method of communication is the future for all kind of telecommunications.