Twilight the Scientific set a few more chapters in her video's timeline, marking off all the other points where the player jumps to when needed. She took a few minutes to revisit some of the documentation of her editing software, even learning how to place subtitles and closed captions for the hearing impaired.
"You know," she thought as she read about how to caption, "maybe I could have thrown in some captions. Make this a little more compatible for those who don't take off their headphones."
With her immediate thought, she realized that she could slow down the playback of the video in such a way where she could more actively transcribe what she had said. As she loaded the next clip into the timeline, she commanded the program to let her input subtitles and ran the playback. Hitherto, she had a little bit of other work to do.
"Internet connections," she began, "How many ways did we come up to connecting to this Internet thing in just the last few decades? I was only a little baby when we used a phone line, and now we're using Ethernet cords without tying up our phone calls at really high speeds. I found myself revisiting the history of Internet connection technologies on the suggestion of someone who wrote in to Twilight Time and I went off to the computer teacher to verify what I was saying. Mind you that he said that he remembers life before that, having to read everything in print that can now be digitized for all the world to see. Anyway, this is the next segment:"
Her monologue ended as her archival footage began:
"And so, this week's Twilight Time comes to us from @therealdtiara. She says:
Dear Twilight,
I can't believe my mom had to cut our high-speed internet access. Is there any other way we can connect to the Internet and pick on blank flanks?
"Well, @therealdtiara," she continued, "the Internet we know today is just millions upon millions of computers, especially servers, and mobile devices, all interconnected together in one big cluster fest of friendship, but they don't necessarily all have to be high-speed connections. All you need is a protocol, an infrastructure, and some means to send and receive digital signals."
The video then turned to an array of devices from a bygone era: a green circuit board with phone line jacks, a gray box with a few green lights on it and some ventilation slits, and another black box with connections for an F-type coaxial cable typical of televisions.
"To begin with, as a matter of fact, not long ago, people would connect to the Internet using other technologies. What I have before you on camera are an external and internal dial-up modem respectively. Basically, a modem is any kind of device that can turn analog signals into digital ones, and vice-versa, and this is important for when you want to move data from one computer to the next."
"In this case," she resumed, pointing to two of the devices, "these dial-up modems let computers send and receive data by using the telephone lines underground and above your house. To access the internet, your internet service provider would give you an access number for your modem to dial, and along with your user name and password, you would have the modem use that number to get onto the network."
The video then went to the view of a whiteboard on which Twilight was writing some basic mathematics.
"The thing was that network connections with these were rather slow at best, in the neighborhood of 56.6 kilobits per second; do the math, and that's barely 7 kiloBYTES per second," she explained as she wrote with a black marker,
"That's practically nothing unless you're trying to move written text and some pictures. Also, nor could you use the phone to call anyone while the connection was active. If you wanted to use the modem to send a fax, that's also good."
"Internet access could also be achieved with what they call an ISDN line," she stated over a picture of another green circuit board, "These also rely on phone lines, but there are at least two channels at play here; a bearer channel for voice and data, and a delta channel for setup and configuration information. The way the channels are split allow for higher speeds, more into 128Kbps, over telephone lines. Naturally, you're going to pay very much for this kind of setup."
"Digital Subscriber Lines," she continued, "are a third phone-based connection with speeds as high as 3 megabits per second. For this, you need a special DSL modem and you can still have the phone line open to make phone calls. The thing about these is that as simple as they are to set up, they were also limited by how close you were to the central office for the telephone company. Both ISDN and DSL connections require you to be within a certain range of the central office, usually as wide as 3.4 miles; the further you were from it, the slower the connection. T1 and T3 are also phone-based and are usually used for businesses and have speeds of anywhere from 1.5 to 45 Mbps. However, they can handle as many as 24 simultaneous calls on a telephone."
As she continued, she showcased the black box with the coaxial connection.
"Now, there are connection technologies faster than the cable connection you're using now, notably fiber. This relies on fiber optics to transmit data and you can get speeds as fast as 1 gigabit per second, way more than what I'm using to broadcast the show, but I can demonstrate that in a later show."
Then, she presented the smartphone she had to the camera, explaining wireless Internet connections.
"Finally, you have Internet connections that are entirely wireless. 1G, 2G, EDGE, and 4G LTE are used among cellular phones and rely on the cellular phone infrastructure. You also have satellite internet connections that are available all over the world via satellite. You'll likely see these on cruise ships and aircraft, but because of how far the data has to travel, it comes off being too slow for someone to use in a power setting."
As the video wound up, Twilight giggled as she was remembering the sarcasm that was her last thought about cyberbullying.
"Oh, and about picking on blank flanks on the Internet, you're so mature for that. You really are. I surely wish I can act my age."
Twilight wound up that segment by placing a chapter marker on the timeline, and she typed at about 45 words per minute to complete the transcription of her speech. She was now starting to understand the fruits of her labor as she even had questions coming into her phone in real time, even asking about how they measure the spiciness of chili peppers.