The Social Distancing Telecommunication Boom in Context

Social distancing mandates heightened use of telecommunications: voice, text and video. Although many are enthralled with video conferencing, 29% of Americans don’t have the necessary broadband. This necessitates revisiting telephony. But this should be done anyway as there is already a future emerging where vocal communication with computers and the internet are far more common. Have you tried clicking on the microphone button for google? Way faster than typing. This is just a start. Let’s take a quick dive into voice telecom.

    I was once part of a mobile phone company, American Mobile Systems, a terrible investment in the 1980s that Craig McCaw's Nextel purchased from us for $0.40 per $1 invested. But the experience of trying to convince unbelieving throngs that there would be benefits from mobile telephony was a good one. We used two main points. The first was taken from Ma Bell:

1) The use of the telephone increases the efficiency of any joint human operations by an average of 17%.

2) The use of mobile telephones increases the efficiency of such operations by almost 30%.

The second argument came from the old makers of the "Radiophone"

Education and politics are joint human operations and therefore similar efficiencies apply. Politics at the community level and education at the community both are failing to use telephony. Children who cannot yet read are languishing and need these long demonstrated efficiencies.

In politics failing to use these efficiencies withers the roots of democracy.