Telecommunication in Jamaica

Introduction & History

People imagine that telecommunications means communications using only electrical or electronic technology, but that isn't so.

Telecommunication is communication over long distances, by means such as by newspapers, telephone, radio, satellite, television and the Internet.

The idea of telecommunication first came from the telegraph. The word telegraphy comes from Greek. "Tele" means distant and "graphein" to write. So the meaning is writing at a distance

The first form of modern telecommunication - the electric telegraph - sent electrical currents along wires.

On 24 May 1844, Samuel Morse sent his first public message over a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, and through that simple act, ushered in the telecommunication age.

By 1868 Jamaica began to use the telegram. The West India and Panama Telegraph Company was the major provider of telecom services in Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean in the mid 19th century. West India and Panama Telegraph Company is now Cable & Wireless today.

However there was limitation to the telegraph you need to put a physical piece of cable between the sender and receiver. That's almost always hard work and expensive - and sometimes impossible. The alternative is to use radio and a code.

Using electromagnetic radiation in the form of radio waves. The Radio was now used to connect people who are moving around - on a ship, on foot or in a vehicle.

In the right circumstances radio signals can be sent and received across great distances, but the range is not unlimited. Radio waves decline in strength over distance and are subject to interference from other sources.

Directing radio waves accurately is not always feasible; they tend to travel outwards along straight lines from the transmitter and did not follow the curve of the Earth.

By 1876 the introduced telephone using basic technology of the telegraph - electrical signals carried along copper wires - but in a different way.

For the first time, people could actually speak to each other while many miles apart. Having a conversation was much faster than sending and decoding messages

Just two years later in 1883 the telephone was introduced to Jamaica to the office and for commercial use. Unfortunately it took almost 100 years for the telephone to become available for the residents of Jamaica in 1978.

Wireless did what its name said - it liberated telecommunications from the need to have a wire-connecting sender to receiver.

At a single bound, telecommunications - first telegraphy, then telephony - could be extended across oceans and around the world.

A signal sent from a wireless transmitter could be picked up by any number of receivers - provided they were listening, and in range.

The late 1960s saw the start of the move from the old mechanical exchanges with their noisy banks of selectors, switch arms and electromagnets, to the electronic exchanges of the future - silent, compact and far more capable.

In the process something else was created - switching that had logic and memory, i.e. that could be programmed and had memory. Machine intelligence had arrived on the telephone network hence the beginning of the Internet

The introduction of mobile phones took over half a century. The introduction of radiotelephony in the 1920s made it theoretically possible for people to talk on the move.

However, effective deployment had to wait for the development of computers to allow networks to be created and miniaturization to make the devices small enough to be really mobile.

When true mobile telephony finally arrived in the early 1980s it was a revolution - for the first time telecommunications really was person-to-person rather than just place-to-place.

In 1991, Jamaica was one of the few countries having a 100% digital telephone network. By 2002 Jamaica had one of the most sophisticated telecommunications infrastructures in the world.

Technologies Involved & Their Determinants

Jamaica’s information and communication technology outlook has been driven by the needs of the market such as the need for speed, timing, accessibility, accuracy and volume also by the government of Jamaica whose desire it is to make Jamaica a centre of e-business and the information technology of the Caribbean. To make this possible the telecommunication industry has increase in importance.

Types