Europe's first glimpse of a live US baseball game

It is rare to visit a museum dedicated to telecoms, never mind one set in beautiful grounds. Nor does it often happen that the visit coincides with an important anniversary for the site.

La Cité des Télécoms, a museum set in 11 hectares of land in Pleumeur-Bodou, Brittany, France, is where the first TV live feed was sent by satellite from the US to Europe.

The Radôme protecting the vast horn antenna

The Telstar 1 communications satellite was launched 60 years ago, on July 10, 1962. The first transmission that included part of a live Chicago baseball game almost immediately followed.

By then, a vast horn radio antenna had been constructed and was awaiting the satellite's first signals. The Radôme houses the antenna, an inflated dome-shaped skin to protect it from the weather. The antenna is built using 276 tonnes of steel and sits on 4,000 m³ of concrete. Just the bolts holding together the structure weigh 10 tonnes. It is also the largest inflated unsupported dome in the world. 

The antenna continued to receive satellite transmissions till 1985. The location was then classed as a site of national historical importance. The huge horn antenna is unique since the twin antenna in the US has been dismantled.  

The Cité des Télécoms museum was opened in 1991 and the site is a corporate foundation supported by Orange. 

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Telecoms' innovation problem and its wider cost

Imagine how useful 3D video calls would have been this last year.

The technologies needed - a light field display and digital compression techniques to send the resulting data across a network - do exist but practical holographic systems for communication remain years off.

Source: Accelerating Innovation in the Telecommunications Arena

But this is just the sort of application that telcos should be pursuing to benefit their businesses.

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Silicon Photonics: Fueling the Next Information Revolution

New book to be published in December 2016

Silicon Photonics: Fueling the Next Information Revolution is the title of the book Daryl Inniss and I have just completed.

We started writing the book at the end of 2014. We felt the timing was right for a silicon photonics synthesis book that assesses the significant changes taking place in the datacom, telecom, and semiconductor industries, and explains the market opportunities that will result and the role silicon photonics will play.

Silicon photonics is coming to market at a time of momentous change. Internet content providers are driving new requirements as they scale their data centres. The chip industry is grappling with the end of Moore’s law. And the telecom community faces its own challenges as the bandwidth-carrying capacity of fiber starts to be approached.

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