Forms of Communication

Communication

Before the information age, we would have to write letters and use phone landlines to communicate between people.

People then invented the telegraph, where people could communicate through Morse code. People laid massive cables across the Atlantic that they used to communicate through, and are still used today. People had wires connected to their house that provided landline, which people could use for phone, or to first get on the internet.

Communication methods used today

• ·         Cell phones
• ·         Email
• ·         Video calls
• ·         Text

Landline phones

Landline phones communicate through wires coming off houses, and into a central box called the exchange box, Mobile phones communicate through radio masts that communicate through with each other to pass over the message. International phone carriers use satellites to carry on over the signal, as well as provide you with 3G as well as 4G. Landline phones are used in the house and can be used to communicate to any phone number, now days, more and more people tend not to get a landline phone and just use their mobile phones instead as they find it much more convenient but also cheaper not to have a landline phone.

Some advantages of using landline phones are that weather and similar effects do not generally impact the communication quality through landlines as well as provide a stable and reliable connection unlike mobile phones that need phone signal.

Disadvantages on the other hand are that landlines are in a fixed location and have to be connected to the landline as well as landlines can be easily hacked into which makes eavesdropping and hijacking a landline fairly easy.

In my personal experiences, I don't use landline phones as often as I did when I was younger because of the increase of other and easier modes of communication. I have mainly used landline phones to talk to family over the phone, however another reason why I stopped using a landline is the increase of telemarketers calling your house phones offering you deals which I always decline. 

Email

Email is the most popular forms of communications, the signal travels down to a transmitter, on to a satellite that then sends it onto a sever that sends it on to another receiver to pass on the message. An advantage of email is that it's very quick, however a disadvantage is that you can't get very much information in it as in documents and files, so it can be very unreliable when used in business when sending a file over.

In my personal experiences with Email, I have mainly used it  when working with other people, and contacting outside companies as it's probably the easiest way to get in contact with them as most business' list their email on their website. I would not personally use email to get in contact with people I knew close and would prefer to send a text or call someone as it's easier accessible on a mobile phone.

Text

Text is another very popular communication system. It is mainly used to send short messages or updates to people that you personally know. To be able to send text messages to you need to be with a phone carrier such as 3, o2, or Orange as well as having a phone signal. The character limit for text messages is 160. If you go over that limit, the message will count as 2 messages and will charge you twice. You can also send pictures over text however it can be much more expensive than texts.

Phones work on the same basis as phone calls. The phone sends a radio signal to the nearest antenna which then send it to an SMS centre. The SMSC receives the message and sends it to the appropriate tower closest to the location of the cell phone and then to the destination.

In my personal experiences, I have only used text to send messages to people that I know and have never used the send image feature. The most frustrating thing about text is the moment when you want to send a message but cannot get signal 

Cell phones

Phone calls made my cell phones work on the same kind of system like text messages. Phone calls are normally more expensive that text messages. For a call, you need the other person on the line to also have signal like yourself, and you also need them to have their phone on themselves so that they can answer a call, that’s why sometimes people might have problems getting in contact with each other, and tend to just tend to contact through text as the person on the other side can later read the text, and even if they don’t have signal, the message will still get to them when they get within range of a phone signal.

Phones work similar to radios, both work on frequencies. When the phone is turned on it searches for the nearest tower station to connect to, if it can't find a station, then the phone is out of signal. When making a call, the antenna nearest to the base station receives the radio signals, and the base station then forwards the signal to an exchange. The exchange connects the call to its destination either a fixed line or mobile phone.

In my personal experiences, I haven't phone called as many people as I have texted. However it can sometimes be easier to get my point across using speech rather than words in a text.