We can all be grateful that, upon deboarding from the lunar lander, astronaut Neil Armstrong had prepared an ace opening line for the first audio transmission from the Moon to Earth: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." How much less impactful would that landmark technological achievement have been if Armstrong had said "You make it out of the hatch okay, Buzz? Watch your head, there."
And yet, a quick survey of communication "firsts" suggests that Armstrong's prescience and eloquence may have been the exception rather than the rule. During the first telephone call in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell somewhat (in)famously said to his assistant, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."
The first email sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson was so unremarkable that not even he can remember what it said—his best guess is "Test123."
The first Tweet, sent in 2006 by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, said simply "inviting co-workers," which doesn't even have a clear intent, let alone opening and closing punctuation (though perhaps it was a foreshadow of the grammatical wasteland that Twitter would become). Was he inviting them to join Twitter (then Twttr)? Was he inviting them to a BBQ? Did he hit the Enter key too soon? We can only wonder.
What is clear is that these innovations in communication accomplished what they set out to do: they transmitted a message faster and/or farther than any previous communications platform could. And that goal has been the driver behind the communications industry for hundreds of years.
Today, 5G networks are only just becoming accessible to consumers, so most of us have yet to experience the expected peak data rates of 20 Gbps. Nonetheless, researchers and industry are already planning for 6G, which is expected to further increase data speeds. By how much, no one is yet sure.
An international program called Terabit Bidirectional Multi-user Optical Wireless System for 6G LiFi hopes to propel laser-based LiFi to an eye-watering terabit per second by 2024. The Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum is planning for a communications infrastructure that uses 1/100th the power to achieve 125 times the data transmission capabilities in 1/200th of the current latency achievable today. And while industry looks forward to new opportunities from ubiquitous LiFi connectivity, researchers are looking farther down the electromagnetic spectrum at the terahertz band as a key player in the next generation of optical communications.
As optical communications announce new "firsts" in the coming decade, we can only hope for more great soundbites like Armstrong's, and fewer like Dorsey's. Not that it really matters: so long as the message comes across faster, farther, and clearer than ever before.
Gwen Weerts, Managing Editor, Photonics Focus
