Tech and AI: 1. How Do You Get Connected?

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Welcome to Understand Tech and AI, the podcast that takes you back to basics to explain, explore, unpick, and demystify the technology that's becoming part of our everyday lives.

I'm Spencer Kelly from BBC Click and you will find all of these episodes on BBC Sounds.

Over the years, I've seen just how much the internet has changed the world.

It's given us access to news, allowed us to share information with others, connected us with old friends and helped us to make new ones.

It's even bringing entertainment, films, books, TV, podcasts and games to those who couldn't access them before.

If you're listening to this on your smartphone, you've used the internet.

If you've searched for something on your laptop, you are an internet user.

If you've ever streamed a movie on your TV, yep, internet.

And if you haven't, should you?

And how would you do it?

Well, to help us understand just how we are getting connected to the internet, I'm joined by Dan Sodegren, who's a technology expert.

Dan, hi.

Hi there.

Okay, so I'm out and about.

My phone is talking to the internet.

There are no wires connected to it, obviously.

How on earth is it doing that?

Yeah, well, you could most probably say light by magic, of course.

Now, it depends exactly, well, isn't it?

It's like almost indistinguishable by magic.

That's the joys of technology.

It depends how your phone is working at the time, depending on which network you're on.

But the principles are the same.

The information is going up to either satellite things or the nearest kind of telephone mask, and it's then pinging it from that and then pinging it straight back down to you.

So depending how near you are to a telephone mask, it depends how quick the whole thing can be for you.

And these masks you can see on hills and you can see sort of hidden in trees all around, those are the things that are relaying the signals to any phones that are around.

Yeah, absolutely.

And they're trying to do more and more of these things and trying to hide them more and more and perhaps sometimes rightly so, but there are lots of them around.

You'll have seen them every day.

What I think is amazing is how stuff travels across the internet.

The stuff that we receive from the internet goes on a very interesting journey.

It does, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

It's a little bit like what they do is they'll chop up all that information, put it into smaller packages, and that's like delivery people legging it around in different places, taking thousands upon thousands of packages, as they call it, of this data, and then bringing it to your doorstep and then building up the picture or the video or the email.

And that's how it works.

So, if I want to watch a cat video, that cat, or at least the video, is chopped up into lots of different bits that are all sent their own way

around the internet and then are all assembled and put back in the right order when they get to me.

And what I love about that is you don't get a jam because the video is going in thousands of different directions.

So it hardly ever gets stuck if there's a major outage down one route.

Absolutely.

And that's exactly why they did it.

And that's why the user experience at the end of it is like magic and it feels like it's just the natural thing to do.

But obviously, technically, it's actually really complicated.

So on my phone, I can see a few things at the top of the screen.

One shows how strong the signal is, which is basically how close I am to the nearest master, I assume.

But then there's something next to it.

And it's usually something like E, 3G, H plus 4G or 5G shouldn't be bothered about that what's the difference between them well it depends how quickly you want to be getting the the information back isn't it so 3G imagine 3G was the world of many years ago of things like text messages and maybe even email but not very much video stuff but 4G then allowed us this was in 2010 4G allowed us to then start using videos and these other things and 5G takes us into a whole new world I'll give you an example on downloads really if you look at something like 3G it would take you about five hours to download a movie perhaps, but with 4G, it would take about 10 minutes.

And then the legend has it that on 5G, it will take even less.

It would take half the amount.

Again, it's a little bit like how much weight can the road take.

You know, the more stuff that's on there, the bigger you need the road to be.

So the more you want to do on a phone, the better the quality of video that you want to see on the screen.

You need a higher G.

Yeah, fundamentally.

But 5G is a weird one because it's a bit of a misnomer because everyone believed that 5G would be quicker than 4G.

But actually, the thing about 5G, it's the number of devices you can have on in a square mile at the same time.

So that's one of the bigger advantages here is that with 4G, you can only have a certain number in that square mile.

With 5G, you can have a million people in that square mile.

But it's not just phones.

It would be things like the Internet of Things.

So it would be other things like sensors.

It would be other things that are more to do with business most of the time.

And that allows us to.

power this fourth industrial revolution when we're getting a lot of data back from a lot of different points and a lot of different things that all need to be connected at the same time.

This isn't really about mobile phones and how many mobile phones people have, it's how many connection points are in a business or a hospital or on the motorways and these other things.

So it's all to do with fueling this next industrial revolution.

Okay, Dan, let's take a break for a couple of minutes because it is time to hear from Dr.

James Sumner from the University of Manchester.

Now, he is our resident technology historian, and he's going to be popping up in each episode to give us an idea of how we got to where we are.

So here he is on how we used to get online before there was even an online to get online on.

In 1967, the BBC science show Tomorrow's World gave us our very first sight of a man working from home in his pajamas.

Industrial consultant Rex Malick feels the business world's pulse from his bedside.

Stock prices and market trends are available to him through Europe's first home computer terminal.

The connection cost the equivalent of around £500 a week in today's money, besides relying on a teletype machine that sounded like a heavy machine gun.

But by the 1970s, realistic home networking seemed to be just around the corner.

Well, almost.

The 1980s saw millions of people buying their first home computers, and yet the idea of connecting them up to other computers struggled to find much appeal beyond serious hobbyists, business users, and, according to the more lurid press accounts, super genius teenage hackers, as shown in the 1983 film War Games, who could set off a nuclear war by mistake.

The reality was less apocalyptic, offering email, news updates, and home shopping, but most people still didn't buy it.

The vision only really took off in the 1990s, when the US government opened up the huge networked system known as the internet to general users, and the World Wide Web gave an easy way to access and to create internet content.

But home users still had a problem.

The standard equipment was a dial-up modem, which not only made a peculiar noise of its own

but took over an entire telephone landline, which was probably the only phone connection in the house.

This problem was only solved in the 2000s with home broadband internet.

An even more radical change was on the way, however, as the mobile phone evolved into the smartphone.

That was Dr.

James Sumner, and we'll hear from him again in the next episode.

So James has brought us right up to date with the internet on your phone, but now let's talk about getting the internet to your home, because that's done in a different way using a wire, essentially, isn't it?

And we generally call that broadband, don't we, Dan?

We do, yeah.

So that big old wire that comes from different places can go into different boxes and then come to your house as well.

So again, we can go back to a wonderful analogy around pipes.

It's how big is your pipe to get the water into your house?

It's pretty much the same with broadband.

How big is the pipe to get the broadband in?

Now, you can get different types of broadband these days.

When you call up one of the comparison sites, there are loads of different options from loads of different suppliers.

And the main thing that I noticed about all of them is they will quote the speed of the connection to your home.

And it's usually in megabits per second.

It could be 10, it could be 25, it could be 50, it could be 200 megabits per second.

What should I be thinking about when I look at those numbers and think, yeah, I'll have that one?

Well, this is something that I was talking about many years ago.

They should simplify all this stuff.

And I think sometimes they make it complicated almost on purpose.

Let's put it into human terms.

If you've got a download speed, 25 megabits per second, then that's, you can have two people watching a video at the same time.

So depending on, again, your usage, how big do you need a water pipe to be?

It's a bit like back in the day, if I was having a shower and my mum was doing the washing, was doing the washing or my dad was using the washing machine, then the water pressure went down and it went to a trickle somewhere.

So how much do you need?

Well, it depends how much you're going to use it.

Now, traditionally, broadband has been delivered to homes over a bit of copper, the same wire that delivers your phone line, hasn't it?

But these days, you can also get fiber, which is a much better connection that gives higher speeds.

But that's a different type of connection, isn't it?

Yeah, it is, absolutely.

And there is a large discussion around this amazing piece of technology because it can transmit data at kind of lightning speed because the fiber optic cables literally deliver it through it in a completely different way.

There's also a moment, and we've got to be aware of this, that you can have fiber optic cable to a point, like to a box, and then actually the last bit can be the copper wire.

So again, it can be that amazing water pipe up to a point, but then unfortunately, only a small pipe to your house.

So that can slow things down.

So we've got to sometimes be a bit careful of believing that we've got fiber optics to the end of our house when we might not do.

It does make it better, doesn't it?

If you have fiber delivering the internet to the end of your road and then there's just a short bit of copper to your house, you still do get decent speeds, don't you?

But just not as fast as you would if you had that piece of fiber going all the way through your wall.

Absolutely, which is exactly why it's very rare that you have that bit of fiber going through your wall.

And of course, it is also, you know, expensive as well.

So you get what you pay for in lots of respects.

But my goodness, the infrastructure change that came about is a huge jump.

And it's of course allowed us all to be on the internet and to use these download speeds that we never had before.

Now, I'll let you into a secret, Dan.

I can't get super fast broadband to my house.

Why not?

It's all to do with how much money people have invested in the infrastructure and how these companies that we pay, what they're doing with that.

Now, don't get me wrong, there is always a real world implication here.

You've got to start digging up roads, which most people don't really like.

You've got to do other things and spend money and infrastructure for it to happen.

But this is one of the things.

We are creating a digital divide when people can't get this connectivity.

I think the reality is that if there's a village of 10 houses that's 30 miles from anywhere else, it costs a company an awful lot to dig up that land just for those few houses.

And so they just won't make a profit from it.

And that's why they don't want to do it.

Well, no, exactly.

And again, this is when it comes down to this thing of, is it important for those companies to make profit or do they have a a social responsibility around connectivity?

But I don't think we can always just say, oh, well, you live remotely.

Well, that's unlucky because it's not profitable for us to get to you.

Because I think deep down, it's a bit of a moral question.

So we've talked about how the internet comes into your home via a cable, but there's one extra thing that you can do when the internet arrives in your home and that is Wi-Fi.

It stands for wireless fidelity.

And it means that you can use your phones or your laptops in your house without cables, doesn't it?

Wi-Fi kind of transmits the internet locally to the confines of your home.

Yeah, no, that's exactly what it does.

So you can take your special wire of the internet and you can pop it into a router and that router then can then transmit it, a bit like with radio waves, to the rest of the house, which of course is how we most probably all use the internet at home.

We aren't connected to cables all the time and certainly our mobile phones are.

And the router.

in case you're wondering, routes the internet wherever it needs to go.

That's why it's called a router.

And importantly as well, I think your phone can be on Wi-Fi in your house.

And that means it's not connected to 3G, 4G, 5G, the mobile internet.

It's now talking to the internet through your home connection instead, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

And that is a great way that you can be making sure you're not using too much data through your mobile data.

And so that's the thing I always say to my daughter is making sure she's on Wi-Fi when she gets home.

We are all relying on the internet much more these days.

Are we all in trouble if the internet goes down?

The reality is, is that the internet is part of, I think you could call critical infrastructure.

So would it ever go down?

I think that's a concept that people have in their heads.

No, I don't think it would.

There's too much money involved in the internet for it all to go down.

There are lots of huge safeguards against it going down.

But of course, you do have outages.

You know, it's not completely impervious, but I can almost promise you that it would never completely go down because conceptually it's not, it can't do, unless we lose all electricity.

And then I say we have a deeper problem.

Dan, thanks so much for your time.

It's been lovely to be on.

So, what have we learned?

Well, the internet uses really clever ways to get stuff to you by chopping it up into tiny chunks.

And if you want a faster connection, you can get it.

You just have to pay for it.

Now that you are online, you have access to more storage and more computing power than you could possibly imagine.

And in tomorrow's episode, we're going to be putting our head into the cloud to see what's up there.

Join us then.

Imagine if you could get hold of your favorite pop star's personal mobile phone.

What might you find out?

I was like, this is a crime.

This is the story of how a group of Korean pop stars and their friends were caught sending each other videos of women they'd secretly filmed during sex, some of whom weren't even awake.

So, what if she's unconscious?

You raped her.

An investigation that blew the lid off digital sex crimes in a country divided along gender lines.

The result of all this is a shattering of faith and trust in Korean men.

I'm Chloe Hajimathayu, and from BBC Radio 4, this is Burning Sun, part of the Intrigue podcast feed.

All episodes are available now on BBC Sounds.

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