World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is celebrated every year on May 17. The purpose is to help raise awareness of the possibilities the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) can bring to societies and economies.
The day was formerly called World Telecommunications Day, but in November 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society called upon the UN General Assembly to declare May 17 as World Information Society Day. Since then, the day came to be known as World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) after 2005.
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History and theme of World Telecommunication Day and Information Society Day :
May 17 marks the anniversary of the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention and the creation of the International Telecommunication Union. This happened when the first international telegraph convention was signed in Paris on the 17th of May 1865. The event was formally instituted in 1973 in Malaga-Torremolinos, Spain, at the ITU plenipotentiary conference.
As touched upon, there is a different theme that is chosen every year to celebrate world telecommunications day. The first theme was chosen in 1969 was the ITU: get to know the ITU.
10 Amazing facts about Telecommunication :
- The first text message sent was “Merry Christmas” by Neil Papworth.
- Hello was supposed to be ‘ahoy’ as suggested by Alexander Graham Bell – but Thomas Alva Edison came up with the word ‘hello’ and that was more accepted over it’s derived from the ship slang – ahoy!
- The longest phone cable is called FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe). It is 16,800 miles long and connects Japan to the United Kingdom. It can carry 600,000 calls at one time.
- Being rude to a telephone operator in Prussia was once a crime. In 1908, a respected citizen was reprimanded by the government after becoming exasperated with an operator and saying “My dear girl!”
- One of the first telephone answering machines was developed in Switzerland during the 1950s. It took three days to install.
- The commercial wireless phone was first introduced in Chicago in 1982 by Ameritech.
- In the first month of the Bell Telephone Company’s existence in 1877, only six telephones were sold.
- About 2 billion people in the world have yet to make a phone call.
- International calls are no longer transmitted over via satellites – these days, this job has been taken over by fiber optics and VoIP – which has also lead to an improvement in the quality of the network and the sound transmitted too.
- Apple’s iPhone may have cut into the list of the world’s most sold phones, but guess who’s also on that list? Nokia’s first models – 3210 and 3310 versions.
