With long-distance signaling technology, it seems that the challenges were what we might call “cost per channel,” “rate of transfer,” and “information security.”
With a fire or heliotrope network, other nearby light sources would interfere with the signal. So a large land area has to be dedicated to maintaining the communication channel, and somebody had to be watching for incoming signals at all times. It was also easy to interfere with messages, including by sending false messages. An expensive, slow, single-channel, insecure long-distance signaling network would have limited usefulness, and it wouldn’t be too surprising to me that the ability to construct more detailed messages on this ultra-slow long-distance network was not a bottleneck for militaries winning battles or governments governing effectively. It seems like delegation was the name of the game, and in fact my impression is that modern militaries continue to focus on delegating authorities to troops on the ground rather than using top-down command and control decision making to the extent that modern communications technologies would theoretically allow.
The advantage of the telegraph and telephone was that messages could be sent faster, with greater security, with the ability to triangulate conversations between specific users, and with far less expense per channel.
So your market-based explanation works nicely here.
With long-distance signaling technology, it seems that the challenges were what we might call “cost per channel,” “rate of transfer,” and “information security.”
With a fire or heliotrope network, other nearby light sources would interfere with the signal. So a large land area has to be dedicated to maintaining the communication channel, and somebody had to be watching for incoming signals at all times. It was also easy to interfere with messages, including by sending false messages. An expensive, slow, single-channel, insecure long-distance signaling network would have limited usefulness, and it wouldn’t be too surprising to me that the ability to construct more detailed messages on this ultra-slow long-distance network was not a bottleneck for militaries winning battles or governments governing effectively. It seems like delegation was the name of the game, and in fact my impression is that modern militaries continue to focus on delegating authorities to troops on the ground rather than using top-down command and control decision making to the extent that modern communications technologies would theoretically allow.
The advantage of the telegraph and telephone was that messages could be sent faster, with greater security, with the ability to triangulate conversations between specific users, and with far less expense per channel.
So your market-based explanation works nicely here.