I’ve not really touched radio stuff in a long while now but here’s my attempt.

Single sideband (SSB) is a radio transmission technique for sending audio (often voice, but many data modes use SSB too) whilst being pretty efficient with the use of radio spectrum. Think like FM and AM modes on a consumer radio, except those approaches take up a bit more bandwidth compared to SSB, so you can’t pack as many stations into a radio band without interference.

And this is where I might be completely off the mark, but this novel approach is interesting compared to the more conventional approaches due to the reduction in the complexity of the components needed to do this and a reduction of waste power. As the other approaches involved essentially generating a double sideband signal (I can’t remember what the technical term is, but part of me thinks this might be standard AM) and filtering out the (typically) lower mirror band.