Ever wondered about the origin story of the internet? Buckle up for an exciting journey that will guide us through its birth in 1958 as a product of the arms race, to its evolution into the communication powerhouse it is today. The internet's intricate mechanics, its robust infrastructure, and its transformation over the decades are all under our microscope.
Hitch a ride as we voyage into the fascinating world of cell phones and the core role the internet has played in its metamorphosis. From the humble beginnings with BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone, see how these early players harnessed the power of the internet. We'll decode the shift of radio frequencies from analog to digital and how it's revolutionized cell phone service. The pressing issue of rural internet connectivity gets a deep-dive, as we examine the present state of internet access and potential solutions.
Ever wondered about the origin story of the internet? Buckle up for an exciting journey that will guide us through its birth in 1958 as a product of the arms race, to its evolution into the communication powerhouse it is today. The internet's intricate mechanics, its robust infrastructure, and its transformation over the decades are all under our microscope.
Hitch a ride as we voyage into the fascinating world of cell phones and the core role the internet has played in its metamorphosis. From the humble beginnings with BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone, see how these early players harnessed the power of the internet. We'll decode the shift of radio frequencies from analog to digital and how it's revolutionized cell phone service. The pressing issue of rural internet connectivity gets a deep-dive, as we examine the present state of internet access and potential solutions.
The internet. There's a lot to talk about Ziggy. It's time to start the show.
Alexa:Hello, adam and Ronnie, it is time to start the podcast and welcome to five acre tech. I will start the timer, 28 minutes starting now.
Adam:What was that noise?
Ronnie:I have no idea. You tell me.
Adam:Well, it's part of the internet. I'll tell you if it just showed up Really.
Ronnie:For real.
Adam:Well, I use the Amazon Echo all the time and this literally just showed up. I mean, I don't want it to answer back, and it's supposed to answer with some kind of noise, where it tells you that it responded with that noise, and now all these weird noises are coming out. I don't recall it ever telling me that it was going to do this. I don't know if my grandkids turn it on by saying something. I don't know if it asked a question, which it does sometimes Just, you know, responding back to.
Adam:Hey I have this new feature. I wasn't around for that, so I need to research that and get rid of it, because it's really weird. Ai Could be AI, could be the new AI and they're just trying to irritate us with it. Good start Now, who knows? It's kind of cool for some people. I mean it would be interesting to have random noises come out letting it know it heard us and responded with an okay by doing that.
Ronnie:My wife says sometimes I have random noises that come out.
Adam:That would be for another show On another channel. Yeah, mine too, unfortunately. So I want to just talk about the internet today. As we were discussing things today, it just kept the topic of the internet just kept going on and on and on, and to the point of where do we start with this? And I'd love to start, and hopefully I don't butt into anything that you got planned, nope.
Ronnie:I don't have nothing planned. But we could start with a factoid that might get us into the internet thing. Perfect, all right. So you want to talk about the internet, so when did it start?
Adam:I think about a week ago.
Ronnie:Yeah, no.
Adam:Got that wrong.
Ronnie:Like the keyboard of last week's factoid. It kind of developed. So there's some debate on when it officially started. But in 1958, eisenhower, the president Eisenhower he got together with a bunch of people to try to keep up with arms race and the whole idea was trying to bring these guys together and come up with an idea to network computers so they could talk to each other faster and develop technology, or you know when it comes to military technology faster, and it was a success.
Ronnie:They actually had a little internet basic thing. It was called let's see here it was called the advanced research projects agency and then they put net at the end of it, eventually made it a word I can't say it right, so I'm not going to try and that worked for a while and they actually were able to communicate in different parts of the world. They got to Norway and Hawaii and the UK communicating with different computers in those areas and eventually that just led to two contractors defense contractors tapping into this so that they could communicate. And it just grew and grew and grew and eventually that internet word went away.
Ronnie:That that thing, and in 1990, it came up with with another form of the internet was what we see today and it just like a giant Lego thing, just got bigger and bigger and bigger until we have it today.
Adam:And that was actually one of my first was to my first question when did the internet come from?
Ronnie:I mean, it's pretty much answers that kind of even that is like fluid, like how it actually came about.
Adam:It's kind of it's it really is, because it's developed and one of the things most people don't know, the internet is free to connect to. It's just a bunch of people that have and companies that have connected up. What you're paying for is the infrastructure. You know it's a large, large infrastructure of parts and people to to dig trenches, to lay fiber optics, to satellites, so there's a lot of moving parts and in order to get that it takes equipment. You have to have a cable modem of some sort, a network interface of some sort. Cable modem is one word. We also have that O and T optical network terminal and then you have what Starlink has put together. So they have their satellite internet that goes to Ethernet through USB C and so the communication is to connect to. That is changing just rapidly.
Adam:And if you don't know what Starlink is, first there was some satellite internet out there, huesnet. Yeah, huesnet there is. There are some others. That's the biggest one you hear all the time it is, and don't quote me on this, this could be wrong, but I think it's a 24,000 mile trip or 23,000 mile trip up and down total just to get the internet from one location to another location on earth through huesnet, through huesnet.
Adam:So if you're trying to do a phone call using Wi-Fi calling or you're trying to do anything that is going to be communication, verbal, it's going to be a delay. Watching TV there's going to be a delay. Tv doesn't matter as much, but definitely video calling, anything like that a huge lights making a huge trip. So we're basically at we're about 250 miles from Houston somewhere and that's a pretty quick. You know, most people can talk from state to state on their telephone. It uses the internet to make those those phone calls and some private networks to do so.
Adam:But when your Wi-Fi calling, you're basically making a trip into the internet to make that phone call and that's really a good way to handle a phone call at home or to business, because sometimes you get poor service due to this, the building it could be, due to all sorts of things that could cause a problem. So what, what you do, I mean you have very little delay. Sometimes there is, you know, especially with telemarketers or you're calling some service or something. There's sometimes a delay there, but not all the time. That's great. You want that. You don't want the long delay, because then then you're talking and then you're answering later, just like that, and you know, pause like that, even in a podcast, is not really fun to listen to.
Adam:So right right so you want something good, so Starlink did low-orbit satellite. So you know, we're basically, you know, 200 miles or less somewhere around there, or kilometers so that's what makes it a little bit better is it's less distance less distance to travel, so that that's what makes this really great.
Adam:There's there's a lot of youtubers that are on boats right now going across the sea, making you know their videos and sending them up and able to communicate perfectly back and forth to each other as they're going across the ocean. Watch one recently. That was really cool. They were just always connected. That's quite expensive to do that. That is very expensive. They're charging a lot of money to do Starlink over overseas, but it's very reasonable for somebody in the outskirts of, you know, a major city where it's very rural and there's not a lot of infrastructure out there. Which infrastructure is growing rapidly. They're dropping fiber everywhere. It's amazing. So Starlink is a really good choice for a lot of people.
Adam:It's not just AT&T, it's not just Verizon spectrum, you can name them all that's out there and so that's, that's what you have, so that that covers a lot of what's happening and you know what. What is it doing now? You know what? What are we? What are we really doing with it? You know who's using it the most and really it's back to cell phones. Tablets. More people are using that. Used to be a lot of computer repair shops. Less people are using computers and they're using tablets and phones. So you know, we have a lot of that out there now which makes it real interesting for the way that we communicate and so much easier. Less bandwidth that's needed, even though we're getting more bandwidth because people want the bandwidth, because we have TV over it. Now, I mean, who wants the satellite TV services anymore? There they're the cable.
Adam:TV is dying. Cable TV is dead. Most places they have. Just these cable companies have turned in from cable TV providers to internet providers, even the one local to me. Well, everywhere I work, you know within 150 miles, 200 miles of the radius, that we kind of work around nobody. I don't know of any particular company now that doesn't use a streaming TV service to sell to their customers.
Ronnie:So it's no longer transmitting it we, we have an Airbnb we don't have cable TV. Yeah, and not one person's complaint exactly. They all know to log in as a smart TV. They can just log into their accounts and watch whatever they want.
Adam:I've got a customer that owns a home and I've put in very good equipment for him use the ubiquity equipment and very large home and he went from direct TV. This is the best thing I got to keep it to. Maybe I'll save a little bit look, quite a bit more money because you're complaining about your service. Let's give it a shot. We can always go back. It took a while and he's he loves it. It works great. It's got to remember to reboot it, sometimes like any other computer device. If it's not working, turn it off and turn it back on again. So that's kind of kind of the way to handle it. They just like anything else out there we've been dealing with for years. You got to reboot the computer to make it work better.
Ronnie:Fresh, fresh load on the operating system even have to do that on an apple even on an apple.
Adam:Wow, yeah, ronnie, even on an apple. We're gonna start that again anyways, maybe we will, maybe we won't. The yeah there. So basically, what I was wanting to cover is the you know where it's all gone to now, you know and where it came from. So we've covered most of that.
Ronnie:It's real interesting because, basically, we started with a dilute and it the kids these days have no idea the pain we went through listening to that screaming noise as our computers dialed up. Oh, my goodness, and waiting and waiting and waiting, switching pages and waiting and waiting and waiting for it to download. Those were. There was times when I would just I hated it, I would not get on the internet, even though it was cool to be able to connect and see something and read something that I couldn't have access to normally.
Adam:It was so frustratingly slow that eh Well, I know we're not we're not done with the podcast today, but I'm gonna start uploading it now and I think that's the best thing to do, and that's the sound Roddy's talking about. Yes.
Adam:That started everything. We kind of hear that with faxing still, yeah, anybody who uses faxes. And that's one of the last things. I wouldn't even think about this before when we're talking about putting the show together, faxing, why hasn't anybody got rid of that yet Now, getting rid of the version of using the analog, then digital over wire, making that same sound communication to send a fax?
Ronnie:You scan it all. Computers scan now. Yeah, you can scan it right into an email and you send it.
Adam:And then you can get an encrypted email service. Now a lot of government agencies require you to fax things. Now that's changing very slow. Why? Just because of the security yeah, hepa compliance. So medical, a lot of it. It requires that. But they're making more and more apps that will work on the iPad or tablet of some sort iPads and it's more secure and encrypted now so they can do a lot of that online without having to send anything off by fax. Or, like insurance agent, having to send something by fax because it's a document that they're using for signing up somebody on insurance and it's medical information is the way they see it.
Adam:So somebody out there needs to do something kind of like they did with TV and went from analog to digital and forced that on everybody to faxing. It needs to happen. It's just gonna be much more, much better to deal with for that communication. So that's just another form of communication that needs to work over the internet. Now there's some internet faxing that's done through some of the all-in-one machine providers that come out and put your copy machine out there. Some of the big ones have several bits of faxing information. They do faxing over the internet, but it's still kind of an old fashioned way of doing it. Some of it's newer, but nobody's made anything. That's just like the, that's just the same thing for everybody that we can all get on quickly. So some kind of something needs to happen with that.
Ronnie:Do you want to talk about fax machine or copy machines? We can, I'm just kidding.
Adam:No, just like one of the best podcasters out there says, we don't talk about printers. They are. I won't say his name, but he is the tech guy you can say his name, no, Leo LaPorte. He's one of the best and he talks about that. We're not talking about printers. We will always talk about printers. It is the hardest thing to work on. It's probably in the same realm of fax.
Adam:Nobody's done anything to make it better, so we got to get out there and somebody's got to come up with something that can work better and they may have, and change is just one of the things. Until it becomes absolutely necessary, it's not going to happen. So the change of the internet is happening because they're making more and more devices all the time. Ronnie's an Android guy and I'm an Apple guy, and that's an interesting thing. Why don't we talk about why you're still an Android guy? Why am I an?
Ronnie:Android guy on the internet Because when the smartphone came out in 2006, 2006, 2008, somewhere right in there right For those who were old enough to be around back then there was only one place you could get the iPhone A, t and T. I remember that and I was not going to be an A, t and T customer so I refused. So the only option was well, initially it was a BlackBerry and then Android, as there are today. There was some Windows phones and some other stuff. I don't think there was any Google phones because Google was 2008 somewhere in there, anyway. So I got an Android and I got very proficient at Android. When iPhone came out and I seen the price, I was like my Android's, just fine.
Adam:So what was your first smartphone? A BlackBerry, blackberry.
Ronnie:Yeah, yeah, and then Android.
Adam:I was thinking mine was a BlackBerry, and I believe it was a BlackBerry for work that they gave me, but then it was a, and I just had the name of it, another operating system that was out there for a while, and PalmPilot, oh PalmPilot. I thought that was before, could it? I think it was before, so I had a PalmPilot and first cell phone was from Sprint.
Ronnie:Palm palette had a. You had to be like learn a whole new language.
Adam:It wasn't that bad, it was pretty, it was pretty good, it was pretty good for for the time. But you know it required the internet and of course, what I would do, since I'm a tech junkie, back when I got my first sprint phone was a flip phone and then the internet was finally coming out over the phone and we found out that we can hijack the phone by putting hooking up a cable and some software to communicate with the phone to use the internet, which was very unusable on the phone, to hook up to USB to get on the internet to check email. It was very slow.
Ronnie:It was today's version of a hotspot.
Adam:Yeah, that was today's that was a long back the back in the future, back in the past. That was the the way we communicated. I was If you're from Texas, you know about Waterburger. So I was in Kingman Arizona and we decided to pull a joke on a couple family members. So One of my family members loves Waterburger and she lived in California now we just got done visiting.
Adam:So we decided to make a video At Waterburger of eating fries and food and I had to painfully edit it with the one of the first editing softwares on Windows. Then I had to go ahead and upload it and it probably took an hour to upload that very short video from Kingman Arizona into the internet, to her email. And so by that time it was already midnight and I woke her up and said, hey, you need to go check your email and watch this. And but you know, things have come a long way. I mean we don't have to do all that. I mean I had to edit it and do it everything in seconds. Now, yeah, it's amazing what we have now.
Adam:Yeah, it really is amazing, absolutely amazing. So why don't we talk about cell phones?
Adam:sure and this kind of goes along with the internet and how the how the internet got started. And at any point, ronnie, if this seems like I'm getting too detailed, ask me to break it down. Okay, so let's see what we can do here. So one of the first Smartphones that came out was obviously the Palm Pilot Blackberry. That all came out around the same time. And then Android came out along with Apple very close to the same time, and I was one of the people that just wasn't going to move to AT&T because it was not feasible in price. The iPhone was outrageous. We all knew it was a great, great tool. I mean, at that point a lot of people were utilizing Apple. I never went to AT&T. I waited for it to come out on Sprint and Then at one point moved to Verizon and then the T-Mobile, and I've been on T-Mobile ever since and you know I figured when I live.
Adam:It's. It's. Everything works fairly decent, but cell phone service can be, can be iffy. It's a lot better than used to be, but five you know five years ago, from you know five years ago, ten years ago, in between there there was really bad service and you know the internet wasn't working.
Adam:great Things were developing, things were getting faster and faster. So, basically, one of the first phones that came out I don't even know if they call it 1g, but that would have been the first generation of the internet. Probably you can, you can start that at the iPhone and then the Android phone, and that was the communication. Then you had 2g and then 3g. We all, pretty much at that point, everybody was starting to get you know this 3G, you know connectivity, and now, yeah, now there was well stopped at 4G and really wasn't there. At&t loves to say it's 4G, but it's really LTE and LTE. So those are like fourth generation internet connections or third generation. And then LTE was the interesting one, because they called it long term evolution and we're all like, wow, we're going to be in LTE for a long time. And then all of a sudden, 5g. I'm like what happened? You know what happened to the long term evolution? This is going to be the thing we're all going to use and basically somebody came up with something else.
Ronnie:So the 4G, 5G, all that G stuff For a lot of us? We think that means the amount, the speed with which our phone is downloading, and that word isn't necessarily associated with the speed, right.
Adam:No, not really. It has to do with that. They're using radio frequencies to communicate, and probably what you were talking about at the very beginning. It started making me think how are they able to do that? You know, overseas the first bit of communicating through, you know, older computers, and they had to do it over radio frequencies. So that was probably one of the first ways to communicate, so as we can take an analog signal and easily push it over radio frequency, now they're using digital to do it, and then they use different types of protocols for the lack of better words For example 5G.
Adam:They had gone forward with radio frequencies and then there was the uproar of 5G. We can't let them do this because 5G is hurting the environment and it's hurting people. It's real interesting because it's using an old frequency, in some cases 600 MHz and up to 800 MHz. So how is that going to hurt somebody when it's already been used once before? So kind of interesting. You know don't want to start a conspiracy on that, it's just interesting that this, this all happened and then with, of course, with the same thing that we're talking about airplanes, and airplanes were going to start falling from the skies and all these things were going to happen. Well, the only thing with that is the, basically the equipment that they use for emergency communication, without saying it verbally, to come on there, on there, and there were some other things out there.
Adam:There was lots of things that actually that was something different. This was. That was when that went down a few months ago. This is basically the, the way they communicated to where they were at on land and they said it was going to start interfering with that. Well, it would have, but they're slowly having to rebuild, which they had plenty of time to do so because they were building this in the background for many years and the aviation industry never went to figure out how to make you know or fix or replace everything in all the planes that weren't such a broad frequency range.
Adam:They needed to narrow it down to a few channels for the lack of you know, not the lack of better words, that's really right and they, they just didn't happen. And so when it all became public, then you know, those things changed. And so what do you do to fix that? You just moved the towers away from the you know the airports for now, till all the planes get fixed. So it's really not a problem? It's, it was. It was a new problem with an old frequency that wasn't hurting anybody.
Adam:And I'm not saying that the frequencies can't hurt anybody in large, large, you know, deep wattages coming out. We really don't have a definitive answer. Nobody's come down and said, okay, we can't do this anymore. But you know, it's very possible. Everybody's different, something could happen to somebody over this, but it seems very responsible. Not many people are dying over cell phones, you know, right and left, as we've heard in the past. So they took it's interesting, they took an old frequency and now pumped in higher speeds. I mean, I hooked up somebody to a T-Mobile home and slash business tower that they can pay $50 a month for to a business that needed it desperately because their internet went down and it wasn't working correctly. It wasn't completely down, but something got blocked and I got over 500 megs down with absolutely no problem.
Ronnie:So we temporarily switched them over to that and yeah, that's pretty incredible when you think about people say, oh, my internet's down and then you can walk in there and set this up in a matter of minutes. Really, right, doesn't take very long. Yeah, they can drive them up and go in with a cellular basically cellular service to their companies.
Adam:That is correct.
Ronnie:That's pretty amazing.
Adam:It is.
Ronnie:I mean people are so dependent on the internet and to have that ability to quickly fix a huge problem. I mean internet goes down with a business. You think about what they can do to them. Lots of money lost, lots of money.
Adam:And this was an interesting one because it was a very well known cable provider and all of a sudden, which the company didn't really move forward and was using the older way of communicating through email, and so it wasn't that they did anything wrong and they just hadn't moved to anything better. Yet it really wasn't that much better. But because of hacking and stuff like that, most likely and we don't have a definitive answer, because tech support would just pretty much say if it's working on the web browser, it should be working there. Thanks for calling Click. We just get rid of people on the phone.
Adam:So they gave up and said we're moving to something else, because tech support was horrible and you don't experience that In the past very much. Everybody was very willing to help, but you don't get those high tech support people anymore from internet providers. So they're gonna have to not only move their email to something more modern they were using pop mail and IMAP mail they're gonna have to move to something more modern which will be more secure for them anyway. So it's gonna be real interesting that that happened. But one of the ports got blocked, we think, and it stopped their email from sending out, and once I moved it to another provider immediately.
Ronnie:everything worked perfectly the the little home tower business tower things. $50 a month 50 bucks a month sounds like cheap insurance For a company to set one of those up and have it in their office ready to go.
Adam:Yes.
Ronnie:Something comes, brute crashes the internet. Because it does happen. Towers go down and they can be up and running. Seems like you should sell more of these. I Believe.
Adam:I believe so. The the cool thing is the Ubiquity dream machine router which I upgraded them during this process because we they had a very old one. It was no longer supported. Oh, our time is up. Our time is up, but we're gonna keep going. Okay, ziggy, stop.
Adam:So this particular router has dual internet ports on it with failover to either distributing which you can distribute by how you want things to go out you can control that or you can just let it be failover. So for my home, I use it for failover. I've got gigabit internet where I live and I use Starlink as my secondary Because I don't want to go through that again, not having a secondary internet. You know, running a business, two businesses from this location. So, and when we get out to the property, we're gonna be doing the same thing and we're all gonna share the internet out there because we're all gonna be connected together and have our own phone system and each office and each piece of the property. And Since there'll be three of us sharing this property out there, we can actually have office phones that work off the same system and extension dial each other. So that's another great thing that can be.
Adam:That started working really great on the internet. Yeah, so the internet has gone Extremely far. I mean it's, it's and very reliable, the voice of IP, extremely reliable now.
Ronnie:Yeah, I was helping you set up the one of your clients phones. In the whole time I'm thinking where? What do we got to plug this into the wall somewhere? Where do we plug it in? You're like no, no.
Adam:No, we don't do that. Fortunately, I bought ones with Wi-Fi because they didn't put wiring in.
Adam:Yeah, it just sometimes that happens if it doesn't coordinate properly. What happens is they want to move in fast and wiring has to be put in and if you don't do it during construction it's gonna be very hard and very expensive. So we actually set that one up. They set it up wirelessly. I came in with with this company that I work with with sometimes and put the phones in and fortunately I decided a while back the phones that we sell we're going to, we're gonna put Wi-Fi in those, just in case it needs it and fortunately for this thing it needed it. So Paid off and works great. And they can't get internet there, even though the fiber optics right going right by them.
Adam:They just can't get seem to get the internet companies to hook them up fast enough. It's been like several, several months. So maybe, maybe they can use something better. Starlink right now they're using the Verizon version of the home internet device. Slash business device works good, but you're routing behind a router on those. So that kind of makes it difficult. If you need, if you don't have a computer there On-site, you can remote to. So it makes it very difficult to open up and get through to work on something remotely. Without a actual computer there you can pretend you're there, cool. So yeah it's.
Adam:It's amazing what has happened and you know where are we going in the future, who knows? But Be more. Be more unconventional. You know, if it's not working, there's more things out there now. I mean $50 a month, you can get 500 down. I've been using it. I use it during COVID, at one point even as a main internet connection, because everything was just down. There wasn't enough people to keep up. Keep the internet running. Hmm, people are just digging through things at fiber optics. Yeah, everybody kept going up and down. They sent everybody home with the pandemic, didn't know what to do. So this was actually very, very good solution.
Ronnie:Well, yeah, all right, is that our show?
Adam:I think it pretty much is. I don't have anything else, I don't either. Well, we'll just end it pretty quick.