Why does it feel like the Internet and Telcos are not being given credit for the past 18 months?

When I was very young, i.e. early single digits, my dad was based in the Lebanon with the United Nations, leaving my mother at home to fend for herself with myself and my even younger sister. And to communicate we kept in touch by letter, tape recordings (also posted with letters) and one-way telephone calls (one person speaks, then waits for the other response - similar to UHF radio). As you can imagine, communiation was….sub-optimal!

In 2020, the world went into its first global lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. And for many, the world kept on ticking, as we moved to our homes and continued to work ‘remotely’. For many, the setup may not have been perfectly ideal - many didn’t have a home office set up, or even space for one! - but we made it work, and a large proportion of the world continued about its business*.

However, in amongst all of this, did telecoms providers and all the online services get recognition for the critical role the played in keeping many economies working? It’s not clear that this is the case - which is interesting. These systems have now reached the ‘normalcy of our electricity or water infrastructure - we take them as a given that they are there, just work, and it’s always been this way. How wonderful!

There is an interesting contrast however. While the telecoms operators laid the groundwork (like the physical infrastructure), in essence almost all of the services on top were completed by other companies: even voice was largely replaced by Whatsapps, Zoom, Facetime and the many other services that provide real-time media functions. (yes, traditional voice traffic did increase on for any mobile operators, however, relative to the amount of calls by the others, it was negligible).

In short, while the last year has been difficult, lets be grateful that we weren’t all being either forced into offices, or all economies being completely shut down!

(for many of course in industries that couldn’t just move online, it was an entirely different proposition, however, even for them, the Internet and modern online tools provided multiple outlets for them to entertain themselves)