It makes me wonder that what is driving the amazing adventure that human has embarked upon in the field of communication. Why they keep on discovering a new method to communicate better. Since the advent of a SIGN which an ancient human might have used to tell something to his/her friend or enemy, we have come a lonnngggggg way…we invented language then we learned to use it elegantly, then we have invented letters to write and pass our thoughts to generations after generation, then we have invented technology and it has given us the greatest leap possible. Below are few amazing communication technologies which are coming in our way and they have the potential to disrupt the world as we know it.

Starlink

As the name suggests Starlink is something to do with stars….well maybe a little nearer to us than stars.

Elon Musk and his company have come up with the great idea of a global internet network being provided by a mesh of many thousands of satellites and this is also for consumer purposes. It has already been tested by many USA bodies and proved to be very successful. Users have started buying the end-user equipment and the reviews are really very cool, like one I watched on Youtube where the user was not even getting 1 Mbps from the USA’s leading internet provider and got 100Mbps from Starlink, I guess you can sense the disruption here. Starlink is using the earth’s lower orbit to place its satellites which has decreased the latency significantly. For now, the Starlink internet seems to be a little costly as per India standard if you compare it with the 20$ that I pay for my 100Mbps connection with unlimited data, Starlink will cost me 100$ per month with around 500$ setup cost. But hell yeah!!!.. I will try it as soon as it is available because of one simple reason…I want to be a part of THIS 😀 😀 . Also, you can take an example of my village which is fairly remote if you compare it with the city I live in (Banglore). Now with the Starlink equipment, I will be able to move to my village and work from there, I can stay there in complete Mango season :).

5G Internet

5G is another adventure that the world will notice for at least the next 20 years, it is already here and large ISPs have started deploying the network for it to make a reality like 4G. With my current internet speed in 4G, I as a person never felt a need for higher internet speed because I(human) process information very slow. But what if I need to talk to a robot, it needs to understand me and take action quickly. Or a better example … if two robots fight, it will be very fast, and see-process-react cycle should be agile. Or if a sensor on a car needs to talk to the speed controller in the car to slow down to avoid a bump(not collision). As an end user I will only prefer a self-driven car that avoids the smallest bump because it assures me that it can avoid a collision definitely. Now this kind of machine-to-machine communication will improve if we have 5G, with 5G the latency can be reduced to 2-3 ms in the lab environment and this is a huge difference. With Starlink internet, they promise 40-50ms latency so you can imagine that the internet you get from 5G will be at least 10 times better than the Starlink. Here is a great demo of 5G by Nokia which I have watched more than 10 times due to its amazingly talking robot hands.

Deep Space Network

Now, this may not be something like the above two topics but it certainly is equally cool. The DSN has been there since 1958 and NASA is using it for the communication between the satellites they have in space. DSN uses something called DTN(delay tolerant network); this is a network where you know that there is a great chance that your data will be lost in the path due to unknown issues like a big asteroid came in the path etc. This is the reason that the protocol uses the store and forward method where the node also stores a copy of data while forwarding it out, it may have to forward it again in case the ack is not received. Now the amazing stuff about this ..do you know Wireshark? Certainly, if you are in the network world. Recently I have seen a video by Laura Chappell analyzing packet capture from the space …yeah you heard it right. Check the below video and have fun.