The global network that we now call the internet was built in London in factories along the River Thames in Greenwich, Charlton and North Woolwich.
One of them, now Alcatel Submarine Networks but originally Telcon, is almost certainly the oldest working factory in the telecoms industry.
And the optical fibre technology that the internet uses today was invented by an electronics engineer, Charles Kao, trained in Woolwich and North Woolwich: he won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics for work started here in south-east London.
Alan Burkitt-Gray, a south-east London-based telecoms and technology journalist and secretary of GIHS, talks in this lecture about the key role our area has in the development of communications, and what a difference this has made to the world.
Greenwich and Woolwich, the birthplace of global telecoms and the internet, by Alan Burkitt-Gray
