Communications Revolution

I speculate how digital communication will radically change in my novel Entangled. Could this really happen soon?

You bet. It's the old adage about some scientists think they can, others think they can't, everything's already been invented, and so on. Quantum Entanglement has been known for a long time. Einstein called it spooky action at a distance (actually, it's an english translation of his german). That means that when two objects, like photons or atoms, are entangled, and one changes its "spin", the other object magically changes its own spin in exact response. Cool, I mean really cool. If it does work like I think it will someday, prepare for a revolution!

The first telegraph was based on flags. Different colors and shapes are a different message. Romans used this and navies adopted it at sea. American Indians used smoke signals. Not to magical, eh?

Even the first electric telegraph invented by Samuel Morse, of the Morse Code you may have heard, wasn't too magical. Electricity was well known by then and instead of a short wire between transmitter and receiver in the same room, a long telegraph (later telephone) wire was strung between two cities. People understood that, could physically touch it.

Next was radio. That was magic at first, the sending of information across the English Channel. No wires! Now that was cool, or like a college buddy told me, FM (fucking magic, but it really means Frequency Modulation in radio speak). Really, radios are cool. Your smartphone has one. WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, they're all cool. You can search the web, send texts. Well, you know that today because cell phones are ubiquitous. But back before digital radio? We only had TV and radio (okay, I just gave away my age), and of course ROCKS to throw at one another, with or without a note attached.

So we have these ways of communicating. What happened to flags, and smoke signals, and radio. They're around still for special applications like sailing (flags), search and rescue (smoke), and driving (radio). Even High Definition television is still around using the old airwaves that analog TV used to own.

So what happens when Quantum "radio" appears? The old stuff will stay around for some applications, like personal area networks and GPS. But in my book I explore briefly the impact on the cellular market, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

Gone. Kaput. Did you know there are 4 BILLION cell phone subscriptions in the world? And what if each subscription averaged $50? That is a monsterous market worldwide. No wonder it's so cutthroat. Can you imagine if that disappeared overnight? I did imagine that in my novel.

So if Quantum Communication really comes about, I think it will decimate the cellular and WiFi industries. More so, I think it will free people from some tyrannical practices the service providers force us into, such as $0.20 text messages. Really? 140 characters for $0.20? That's skyway robbery;)