CW@60: Christmas in the Falklands and the importance of keeping in touch

A massive gamble

Back then, the whole idea of putting voice traffic over a data network felt like a massive gamble. The voice folks and the data guys lived in totally different worlds. They had separate budgets, separate teams, and completely different ways of thinking. Suggesting they should share the same network setup was like trying to force cats and dogs to live together.

The market started moving way too fast for the older hardware brands to keep up. Suddenly everyone wanted IP phones. Then call centres started switching over to software, and before anyone could really catch their breath, video arrived.

I still remember the first time a face popped up on a screen and actually reacted to me in real time. It completely threw me. To be brutally honest, I didn’t really care about the clever tech- it was just how human it felt.

You suddenly got all those little things you completely miss on a regular phone call, like a quick smile, a smirk, or someone hesitating before they spoke. It felt like something straight out of a sci-fi film.

Mind you, those early telepresence rooms were a massive hassle to set up. They needed heavy-duty air conditioning, special furniture, and they even painted the walls a specific, weird shade of brown just to make people’s skin tones look normal on camera.

But that first video call hit me harder than most people might expect, because it stood in stark contrast to an earlier chapter of my life.

Christmas in the Falklands

Years before all that, as a young Royal Signals tech, I spent Christmas in the Falklands. The wind there never really lets up. It just howls across the empty landscape, constantly reminding you exactly how far away you are from home. Keeping in touch with anyone back then was a massive luxury.

Airmail only turned up once a week, and that was only if the weather was good enough for the planes. Those thin blue letters – we called them “blueys” – were everything to us. You’d end up reading the same few paragraphs over and over again. The news inside didn’t change, obviously, but you just needed to feel that connection.

“When I think about it, my job has never really been about the technology itself. It’s always been about people. It’s about stopping all the little frustrations that get in the way when we try to talk to each other, and making the world feel a bit smaller when people are miles apart”

Tim Banting, So What? Now What?

Phone calls were even harder to come by. There were only a few phones around the complex and the queues were massive. On Christmas Day, I spent nearly an hour standing in line, practising what I wanted to say to my family back in Watford. But when the line finally connected, the awful five-second satellite delay messed everything up.

We just kept cutting each other off, saying sorry, and trying to guess when the other person had finished speaking. I had to start using proper military radio procedure and saying “over” whenever I stopped talking. It was really annoying, but worse than that, it made me feel completely cut off from everyone. It made the distance feel heavy, like a physical weight.

Staying in touch

Looking back, that whole experience stuck with me a lot more than I thought it would. It made me realise that staying in touch isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s something we genuinely need as humans. We simply have to hear from the people who matter to us on a regular basis. When you lose that connection, it hits you hard right away.

So when I saw that first video call at Cisco, besides being a technical milestone – from London to San Jose in California using an IP phone to dial the distant end’s conference room – it was a revelation. It was the opposite of what I experienced in the Falklands. 

Those two things – the loneliness of that freezing, empty island and the shock of seeing live video for the first time – ended up shaping my whole career.

It gave me a real drive for new tech that changes how companies work. It also made me realise the tools we build aren’t just about saving money or making people work faster – they’re for people. Whether that’s employees trying to do their jobs, or families separated by thousands of miles of ocean who just want to feel closer.

Since those early days, the whole sector has changed completely. We used to rely on massive, expensive kit stuck inside dedicated boardrooms. Now, everything just runs as simple software on our laptops or mobile phones. We stopped messing about with separate networks and bundled everything together. You don’t even have to book meetings days in advance anymore either; you just hop onto a quick, casual chat whenever you need to.

It’s funny, looking back – we went from constantly asking if people could actually hear us to just saying, “I’ll send over a link.”

Jump on a call

But the real win with all this change is how easy it’s made everything to use. Nowadays, pretty much anyone can jump onto a video call from wherever they happen to be.

Working from home is normal life now, and teams are scattered all over the place. It’s also made it way easier to keep in touch with people, whether that’s colleagues or family overseas. It’s still a bit mind-boggling that all the kit which used to fill massive metal racks now slides right into your pocket.

When I think about it, my job has never really been about the technology itself. It’s always been about people. It’s about stopping all the little frustrations that get in the way when we try to talk to each other, and making the world feel a bit smaller when people are miles apart. Mostly, I just wanted to make sure nobody else had to feel as completely cut off as I did during that Christmas down in the Falklands.

The move to unified communications didn’t just shake up the tech sector, it’s completely changed everyone’s lives. Even now, it’s still altering the way we get through our workdays, whether in a global pandemic or a heatwave in the UK. And, more importantly, keeping in touch with each other.

Tim Banting has been a technology analyst for over 12 years and has worked in IT for nearly 30 years. He is currently founder and principal analyst at So What? Now What?