History and State of Telecommunications In The Steppes

The most rudimentary form of telecommunication to be found in The Steppes was the ordinary mail developed in a largely military fashion in order to coordinate the many tenant farmers on the public stallian crops and the stallian army. This ruthlessly efficient military mail service was much later exported to Tershelle-Val and is still maintained with typically stallian punctuality. Despite how seriously stallians take their mail and parcel delivery deadlines, other cities have never adopted this model, instead allowing civilian corporations to take over the endeavours.

The development of communications at a distance halted to a stop for many years after the establishment of the stallian mail service. Citizens of Arrakans have always appeared to have their communication needs covered with vigorous shouting and yelling, so there was zero development on their part.

It wasn't until the construction of the veshite-stallian railway that necessity pushed thinking heads to develop faster wire communications. The telegraph appears to have been conceived by observing "patterns in pulses of energy" inside barely functional saurian era machinery. The first telegraph was deployed along the railway as a way to convey quick information between Stallia and the different garrisons along the line concerning the construction's progress and above all enemy raids and attacks, shortening the different garrisons' reaction time.

It was later in Ill-Vess that the telephone was developed. For many years, Ill-Vess stood almost alone in the use of telephones while Stallia and Arrakans lagged behind. The city's response was the creation of the Veshite Telephone Company in order to lobby for the advancement of telecommunications all over The Steppes. The company has ever since diversified to adapt to newer forms of communications and their laboratories have been the driving force behind many innovations in the field. They are estimated to have built almost 80% of all telecom networks.

The latest development on the field was the wireless radio. Over the last few years the Veshite Telephone Company's laboratories have been refining and improving on their original designs to such an extent as to allow the implantation of relatively small transceivers not only on ships but also land vehicles and even planes or some unfortunate grunt's backpack. While originally conceived for military uses, forward-looking veshite and nivharian media tycoons were quick to seize this new invention and turn it into a mass phenomenon.

The nivharian case was especially dramatic, with hundreds of radio stations, some no bigger than a teenager's bedroom, sprouting like mushrooms, altering the city's profile with countless antennae and radio towers. The increasing number and power of receivers had however an unaccounted effect, showing all of The Steppes to be showered in radio waves emanating from nearby celestial objects, specially what has been deduced to be artificial satellites in low orbit, likely of saurian origin. These transmissions seem to consist almost exclusively of noise, but sometimes patterns can be recognized in them. Amateurs and laboratories all over the place have been trying to decipher these transmissions ever since without any proven success.

The Veshite Telephone Company is of course leading all the efforts and has in fact undertaken the self-imposed challenge of communicating with the sources of these transmissions. For this purpose the company has been developing new technologies outside the telecommunications market strictly speaking. For example, the use of radio waves to detect objects at a distance seems to be undergoing testing stages and is widely believed to have already been employed for military purposes and even to aid in the location of these orbiting bodies.