Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over

wire Overhead power cabling. The conductor consists of seven strands of steel (centre, high tensile strength), surrounded by four outer layers of aluminium (high conductivity). Sample diameter 40 mm A wire is a flexible strand of metal. Wire is c ...

radio Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmi ...

optical Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultravio ...

, or other

electromagnetic In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge. It is the second-strongest of the four fundamental interactions, after the strong force, and it is the dominant force in the interactions o ...

systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that feasible with the human voice, but with a similar scale of expediency; thus, slow systems (such as postal mail) are excluded from the field. The

transmission media A transmission medium is a system or substance that can mediate the propagation of signals for the purposes of telecommunication. Signals are typically imposed on a wave of some kind suitable for the chosen medium. For example, data can modulate ...

in telecommunication have evolved through numerous stages of technology, from

beacon A beacon is an intentionally conspicuous device designed to attract attention to a specific location. A common example is the lighthouse, which draws attention to a fixed point that can be used to navigate around obstacles or into port. More mode ...

s and other visual signals (such as smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs,

signal flag Flag signals can mean any of various methods of using flags or pennants to send signals. Flags may have individual significance as signals, or two or more flags may be manipulated so that their relative positions convey symbols. Flag signals allo ...

s, and optical

heliograph A heliograph () is a semaphore system that signals by flashes of sunlight (generally using Morse code) reflected by a mirror. The flashes are produced by momentarily pivoting the mirror, or by interrupting the beam with a shutter. The heliograp ...

s), to

electrical cable An electrical cable is an assembly of one or more wires running side by side or bundled, which is used to carry electric current. One or more electrical cables and their corresponding connectors may be formed into a ''cable assembly'', whic ...

and

electromagnetic radiation In physics, electromagnetic radiation (EMR) consists of waves of the electromagnetic (EM) field, which propagate through space and carry momentum and electromagnetic radiant energy. It includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, (visible) li ...

, including light. Such transmission paths are often divided into

communication channel A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for informa ...

s, which afford the advantages of multiplexing multiple concurrent communication sessions. ''Telecommunication'' is often used in its plural form. Other examples of pre-modern long-distance communication included audio messages, such as coded

drumbeats Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular rec ...

, lung-blown

horns Horns or The Horns may refer to: * Plural of Horn (instrument), a group of musical instruments all with a horn-shaped bells * The Horns (Colorado), a summit on Cheyenne Mountain * ''Horns'' (novel), a dark fantasy novel written in 2010 by Joe Hill ...

, and loud

whistle A whistle is an instrument which produces sound from a stream of gas, most commonly air. It may be mouth-operated, or powered by air pressure, steam, or other means. Whistles vary in size from a small slide whistle or nose flute type to a lar ...

s. 20th- and 21st-century technologies for long-distance communication usually involve electrical and electromagnetic technologies, such as

telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas p ...

, telephone, television and

teleprinter A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Init ...

networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

, radio,

microwave transmission Microwave transmission is the transmission of information by electromagnetic waves with wavelengths in the microwave frequency range of 300MHz to 300GHz(1 m - 1 mm wavelength) of the electromagnetic spectrum. Microwave signals are normally limi ...

optical fiber An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass ( silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a mea ...

, and

communications satellite A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunication signals via a transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a receiver at different locations on Earth ...

s. A revolution in

wireless communication Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most ...

began in the first decade of the 20th century with the pioneering developments in

radio communications Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmi ...

by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the

Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

in 1909, and other notable pioneering inventors and developers in the field of electrical and electronic telecommunications. These included

Charles Wheatstone Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS FRSE DCL LLD (6 February 1802 – 19 October 1875), was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope (a device for di ...

and

Samuel Morse Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph ...

(inventors of the telegraph),

Antonio Meucci Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci ( , ; 13 April 1808 – 18 October 1889) was an Italian inventor and an associate of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a major political figure in the history of Italy.

and Alexander Graham Bell (some of the inventors and developers of the telephone, see

Invention of the telephone The invention of the telephone was the culmination of work done by more than one individual, and led to an array of lawsuits relating to the patent claims of several individuals and numerous companies. Early development The concept of th ...

), Edwin Armstrong and Lee de Forest (inventors of radio), as well as Vladimir K. Zworykin,

John Logie Baird John Logie Baird FRSE (; 13 August 188814 June 1946) was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926. He went on to invent the first publicly dem ...

and

Philo Farnsworth Philo Taylor Farnsworth (August 19, 1906 – March 11, 1971) was an American inventor and television pioneer. He made many crucial contributions to the early development of all-electronic television. He is best known for his 1927 invention of t ...

(some of the inventors of television). According to ''Article 1.3'' of the

Radio Regulations Radio regulation refers to the regulation and licensing of radio in international law, by individual governments, and by municipalities. International regulation The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is a specialized agency of the Unit ...

(RR), telecommunication is defined as ''« Any transmission, emission or reception of signs, signals, writings, images and sounds or intelligence of any nature by

, radio, optical, or other

systems''.» This definition is identical to those contained in the Annex to the

Constitution and Convention of the International Telecommunication Union The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Constitution and Convention of the International Telecommunication Union (short: ITU Constitution and Convention or ITU CS CV) is an international treaty, signed and ratified by almost all countrie ...

(Geneva, 1992). The early telecommunication networks were created with copper wires as the physical medium for signal transmission. For many years, these networks were used for basic phone services, namely voice and telegrams. Since the mid-1990s, as the internet has grown in popularity, voice has been gradually supplanted by data. This soon demonstrated the limitations of copper in data transmission, prompting the development of optics.

Etymology

The word ''telecommunication'' is a compound of the Greek prefix ''tele-'' (τῆλε), meaning ''distant'', ''far off'', or ''afar'', and the Latin ''communicare'', meaning ''to share''. Its modern use is adapted from the French, because its written use was recorded in 1904 by the French engineer and novelist

Édouard Estaunié Édouard Estaunié (4 February 1862 in Dijon – 2 April 1942 in Paris) was a French novelist. Estaunié trained as a scientist and engineer, working at the Post and Telepgraph service and training further in Holland, before turning to the novel i ...

. ''Communication'' was first used as an English word in the late 14th century. It comes from Old French comunicacion (14c., Modern French communication), from Latin communicationem (nominative communicatio), noun of action from past participle stem of communicare, "to share, divide out; communicate, impart, inform; join, unite, participate in," literally, "to make common," from communis."

History

Beacons and pigeons

Homing pigeons have been used throughout history by different cultures.

Pigeon post Pigeon post is the use of homing pigeons to carry messages. Pigeons are effective as messengers due to their natural homing abilities. The pigeons are transported to a destination in cages, where they are attached with messages, then the pigeo ...

had

Persia Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...

n roots and was later used by the Romans to aid their military.

Frontinus Sextus Julius Frontinus (c. 40 – 103 AD) was a prominent Roman civil engineer, author, soldier and senator of the late 1st century AD. He was a successful general under Domitian, commanding forces in Roman Britain, and on the Rhine and Danube ...

claimed

Julius Caesar Gaius Julius Caesar (; ; 12 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC), was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, ...

used pigeons as messengers in his conquest of

Gaul Gaul ( la, Gallia) was a region of Western Europe first described by the Romans. It was inhabited by Celtic and Aquitani tribes, encompassing present-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg, most of Switzerland, parts of Northern Italy (only during ...

. The

Greeks The Greeks or Hellenes (; el, Έλληνες, ''Éllines'' ) are an ethnic group and nation indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions, namely Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, oth ...

also conveyed the names of the victors at the

Olympic Games The modern Olympic Games or Olympics (french: link=no, Jeux olympiques) are the leading international sporting events featuring summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a vari ...

to various cities using homing pigeons. In the early 19th century, the Dutch government used the system in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

and Sumatra. And in 1849,

Paul Julius Reuter Paul Julius Reuter (born Israel Beer Josaphat; 21 July 1816 – 25 February 1899), later ennobled as Freiherr von Reuter (Baron von Reuter), was a German-born British entrepreneur who was a pioneer of telegraphy and news reporting.Aachen and

Brussels Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

, a service that operated for a year until the gap in the telegraph link was closed. In the Middle Ages, chains of

s were commonly used on hilltops as a means of relaying a signal. Beacon chains suffered the drawback that they could only pass a single bit of information, so the meaning of the message such as "the enemy has been sighted" had to be agreed upon in advance. One notable instance of their use was during the Spanish Armada, when a beacon chain relayed a signal from Plymouth to

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

. In 1792, Claude Chappe, a French engineer, built the first fixed visual

telegraphy Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore is a method of telegraphy, whereas ...

system (or semaphore line) between

Lille Lille ( , ; nl, Rijsel ; pcd, Lile; vls, Rysel) is a city in the northern part of France, in French Flanders. On the river Deûle, near France's border with Belgium, it is the capital of the Hauts-de-France region, the prefecture of the N ...

and Paris. However semaphore suffered from the need for skilled operators and expensive towers at intervals of ten to thirty kilometres (six to nineteen miles). As a result of competition from the electrical telegraph, the last commercial line was abandoned in 1880.

Telegraph and telephone

On July 25, 1837, the first commercial

electrical telegraph Electrical telegraphs were point-to-point text messaging systems, primarily used from the 1840s until the late 20th century. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems ...

was demonstrated by English inventor Sir

William Fothergill Cooke Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879) was an English inventor. He was, with Charles Wheatstone, the co-inventor of the Cooke-Wheatstone electrical telegraph, which was patented in May 1837. Together with John Ricardo he f ...

and English scientist Sir

. Both inventors viewed their device as "an improvement to the xistingelectromagnetic telegraph" and not as a new device.

independently developed a version of the electrical telegraph that he unsuccessfully demonstrated on September 2, 1837. His code was an important advance over Wheatstone's signaling method. The first

transatlantic telegraph cable Transatlantic telegraph cables were undersea cables running under the Atlantic Ocean for telegraph communications. Telegraphy is now an obsolete form of communication, and the cables have long since been decommissioned, but telephone and data a ...

was successfully completed on July 27, 1866, allowing transatlantic telecommunication for the first time. The conventional telephone was patented by Alexander Bell in 1876. Elisha Gray also filed a caveat for it in 1876. Gray abandoned his caveat and because he did not contest Bell's priority, the examiner approved Bell's patent on March 3, 1876. Gray had filed his caveat for the variable resistance telephone, but Bell was the first to document the idea and test it in a telephone. 8

Antonio Meucci Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci ( , ; 13 April 1808 – 18 October 1889) was an Italian inventor and an associate of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a major political figure in the history of Italy.

invented a device that allowed the electrical transmission of voice over a line nearly 30 years before in 1849, but his device was of little practical value because it relied on the electrophonic effect requiring users to place the receiver in their mouths to "hear." The first commercial telephone services were set up by the Bell Telephone Company in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of

New Haven New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,023 ...

and London.

Radio and television

In 1894, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi began developing a wireless communication using the then-newly discovered phenomenon of radio waves, showing by 1901 that they could be transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean. This was the start of

wireless telegraphy Wireless telegraphy or radiotelegraphy is transmission of text messages by radio waves, analogous to electrical telegraphy using cables. Before about 1910, the term ''wireless telegraphy'' was also used for other experimental technologies for ...

by radio. On 17 December 1902, a transmission from the Marconi station in

Glace Bay Glace Bay (Scottish Gaelic: ''Glasbaidh'') is a community in the eastern part of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality in Nova Scotia, Canada. It forms part of the general area referred to as Industrial Cape Breton. Formerly an incorporated ...

, Nova Scotia, Canada, became the world's first radio message to cross the Atlantic from North America. In 1904, a commercial service was established to transmit nightly news summaries to subscribing ships, which incorporated them into their onboard newspapers.

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

accelerated the development of radio for military communications. After the war, commercial radio

AM broadcasting AM broadcasting is radio broadcasting using amplitude modulation (AM) transmissions. It was the first method developed for making audio radio transmissions, and is still used worldwide, primarily for medium wave (also known as "AM band") transm ...

began in the 1920s and became an important mass medium for entertainment and news.

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

again accelerated the development of radio for the wartime purposes of aircraft and land communication, radio navigation, and radar. Development of stereo

FM broadcasting FM broadcasting is a method of radio broadcasting using frequency modulation (FM). Invented in 1933 by American engineer Edwin Armstrong, wide-band FM is used worldwide to provide high fidelity sound over broadcast radio. FM broadcasting is cap ...

of radio began in the 1930s in the United States and the 1970s in the United Kingdom, displacing AM as the dominant commercial standard. On March 25, 1925,

demonstrated the transmission of moving pictures at the London department store

Selfridges Selfridges, also known as Selfridges & Co., is a chain of high-end department stores in the United Kingdom that is operated by Selfridges Retail Limited, part of the Selfridges Group of department stores. It was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridg ...

. Baird's device relied upon the

Nipkow disk A Nipkow disk (sometimes Anglicized as Nipkov disk; patented in 1884), also known as scanning disk, is a mechanical, rotating, geometrically operating image scanning device, patented in 1885 by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. This scanning disk was a funda ...

and thus became known as the

mechanical television Mechanical television or mechanical scan television is a television system that relies on a mechanical scanning device, such as a rotating disk with holes in it or a rotating mirror drum, to scan the scene and generate the video signal, and a si ...

. It formed the basis of experimental broadcasts done by the

British Broadcasting Corporation #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

beginning on 30 September 1929. However, for most of the 20th century, televisions depended on the cathode ray tube invented by Karl Braun. The first version of such a television to show promise was produced by

and demonstrated to his family on 7 September 1927. After

, interrupted experiments resumed and television became an important home entertainment broadcast medium.

Thermionic valves

The type of device known as a '' thermionic tube'' or ''thermionic valve'' uses

thermionic emission Thermionic emission is the liberation of electrons from an electrode by virtue of its temperature (releasing of energy supplied by heat). This occurs because the thermal energy given to the charge carrier overcomes the work function of the mater ...

of electrons from a heated cathode for a number of fundamental electronic functions such as signal amplification and current rectification. The simplest vacuum tube, the diode invented in 1904 by

John Ambrose Fleming Sir John Ambrose Fleming FRS (29 November 1849 – 18 April 1945) was an English electrical engineer and physicist who invented the first thermionic valve or vacuum tube, designed the radio transmitter with which the first transatlantic ra ...

, contains only a heated electron-emitting cathode and an anode. Electrons can only flow in one direction through the device—from the cathode to the anode. Adding one or more

control grid The control grid is an electrode used in amplifying thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) such as the triode, tetrode and pentode, used to control the flow of electrons from the cathode to the anode (plate) electrode. The control grid usually consist ...

s within the tube enables the current between the cathode and anode to be controlled by the voltage on the grid or grids. These devices became a key component of electronic circuits for the first half of the 20th century and were crucial to the development of radio, television, radar,

sound recording and reproduction Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording ...

, long-distance telephone networks, and analogue and early digital computers. While some applications had used earlier technologies such as the

spark gap transmitter A spark-gap transmitter is an obsolete type of radio transmitter which generates radio waves by means of an electric spark."Radio Transmitters, Early" in Spark-gap transmitters were the first type of radio transmitter, and were the main type use ...

for radio or

mechanical computer A mechanical computer is a computer built from mechanical components such as levers and gears rather than electronic components. The most common examples are adding machines and mechanical counters, which use the turning of gears to increment out ...

s for computing, it was the invention of the thermionic vacuum tube that made these technologies widespread and practical, leading to the creation of

electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...

. In the 1940s, the invention of

semiconductor devices A semiconductor device is an electronic component that relies on the electronic properties of a semiconductor material (primarily silicon, germanium, and gallium arsenide, as well as organic semiconductors) for its function. Its conductivity l ...

made it possible to produce

solid-state Solid state, or solid matter, is one of the four fundamental states of matter. Solid state may also refer to: Electronics * Solid-state electronics, circuits built of solid materials * Solid state ionics, study of ionic conductors and their use ...

devices, which are smaller, cheaper, and more efficient, reliable, and durable than thermionic tubes. Starting in the mid-1960s, thermionic tubes were replaced with the

transistor upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch ...

. Thermionic tubes still have some applications for certain high-frequency amplifiers.

Computer networks and the Internet

On 11 September 1940,

George Stibitz George Robert Stibitz (April 30, 1904 – January 31, 1995) was a Bell Labs researcher internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was known for his work in the 1930s and 1940s on the realization of Boolea ...

transmitted problems for his Complex Number Calculator in New York using a

teletype A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Init ...

and received the computed results back at

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the nor ...

. This configuration of a centralized computer ( mainframe) with remote

dumb terminals A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and ...

remained popular well into the 1970s. In the 1960s, researchers started to investigate

packet switching In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into '' packets'' that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the p ...

, a technology that sends a message in portions to its destination asynchronously without passing it through a centralized mainframe. A four-

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines ...

network Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

emerged on 5 December 1969, constituting the beginnings of the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

, which by 1981 had grown to 213 nodes. ARPANET eventually merged with other networks to form the Internet. While Internet development was a focus of the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

(IETF) who published a series of

Request for Comments A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or g ...

documents, other networking advancements occurred in industrial laboratories, such as the

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

(LAN) developments of

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1 ...

(1983) and

Token Ring Token Ring network IBM hermaphroditic connector with locking clip. Screen contacts are prominently visible, gold-plated signal contacts less so. Token Ring is a computer networking technology used to build local area networks. It was introduc ...

(1984).

Growth of transmission capacity

The effective capacity to exchange information worldwide through two-way telecommunication networks grew from 281

petabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...

(pB) of optimally compressed information in 1986 to 471 pB in 1993 to 2.2

exabytes The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

(eB) in 2000 to 65 eB in 2007. This is the informational equivalent of two newspaper pages per person per day in 1986, and six entire newspapers per person per day by 2007. Given this growth, telecommunications play an increasingly important role in the world economy and the global telecommunications industry was about a $4.7 trillion sector in 2012.Introduction to the Telecommunications Industry
, Internet Engineering Task Force, June 2012. The service revenue of the global telecommunications industry was estimated to be $1.5 trillion in 2010, corresponding to 2.4% of the world's gross domestic product (GDP).

Technical concepts

Modern telecommunication is founded on a series of key concepts that experienced progressive development and refinement in a period of well over a century:

Basic elements

Telecommunication technologies may primarily be divided into wired and wireless methods. Overall, a basic telecommunication system consists of three main parts that are always present in some form or another: * A

transmitter In electronics and telecommunications, a radio transmitter or just transmitter is an electronic device which produces radio waves with an antenna. The transmitter itself generates a radio frequency alternating current, which is applied to the ...

that takes information and converts it to a

signal In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The '' IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing' ...

* A

transmission medium A transmission medium is a system or substance that can mediate the propagation of signals for the purposes of telecommunication. Signals are typically imposed on a wave of some kind suitable for the chosen medium. For example, data can modulat ...

, also called the ''physical channel,'' that carries the signal (e.g. the "free space channel") * A receiver that takes the signal from the channel and converts it back into usable information for the recipient In a

radio broadcasting station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio ...

, the station's large power amplifier is the transmitter and the broadcasting antenna is the interface between the power amplifier and the free space channel. The free space channel is the transmission medium and the receiver's antenna is the interface between the free space channel and the receiver. Next, the radio receiver is the destination of the radio signal, where it is converted from electricity to sound. Telecommunication systems are occasionally "duplex" (two-way systems) with a single box of

working as both the transmitter and a receiver, or a ''transceiver'' (e.g., a

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whi ...

). The transmission electronics and the receiver electronics within a transceiver are quite independent of one another. This can be explained by the fact that radio transmitters contain power amplifiers that operate with electrical powers measured in watts or kilowatts, but radio receivers deal with radio powers measured in microwatts or nanowatts. Hence, transceivers have to be carefully designed and built to isolate their high-power circuitry and their low-power circuitry from each other to avoid interference. Telecommunication over fixed lines is called

point-to-point communication Point-to-point, point to point, or port to port may refer to: Technology * Point-to-point construction, an electronics assembly technique * Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), part of the Internet protocol suite * Point-to-point (telecommunications), ...

because it occurs between a transmitter and a receiver. Telecommunication through radio broadcasts is called broadcast communication because it occurs between a powerful transmitter and numerous low-power but sensitive radio receivers. Telecommunications in which multiple transmitters and multiple receivers have been designed to cooperate and share the same physical channel are called multiplex systems. The sharing of physical channels using multiplexing often results in significant cost reduction. Multiplexed systems are laid out in telecommunication networks and multiplexed signals are switched at nodes through to the correct destination terminal receiver.

Analog versus digital communications

Communications signals can be sent by analog signals or digital signals via analog communication systems or

digital communication Data transmission and data reception or, more broadly, data communication or digital communications is the transfer and reception of data in the form of a digital bitstream or a digitized analog signal transmitted over a point-to-point or ...

systems. Analog signals vary continuously with respect to the information, while digital signals encode information as a set of discrete values (e.g., a set of ones and zeroes). During propagation and reception, information contained in analog signals is degraded by undesirable physical noise. Commonly, the noise in a communication system can be expressed as adding or subtracting from the desirable signal in a random way. This form of noise is called

additive noise Additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is a basic noise model used in information theory to mimic the effect of many random processes that occur in nature. The modifiers denote specific characteristics: * ''Additive'' because it is added to any nois ...

, with the understanding that the noise can be negative or positive at different instances. Unless the additive noise disturbance exceeds a certain threshold, the information contained in digital signals will remain intact. Their resistance to noise represents a key advantage of digital signals over analog signals. However, digital systems fail catastrophically when noise exceeds the system's ability to autocorrect. On the other hand, analog systems fail gracefully: as noise increases, the signal becomes progressively more degraded but still usable. Also, digital transmission of

continuous data In mathematics and statistics, a quantitative variable may be continuous or discrete if they are typically obtained by ''measuring'' or ''counting'', respectively. If it can take on two particular real values such that it can also take on all r ...

unavoidably adds

quantization noise Quantization, in mathematics and digital signal processing, is the process of mapping input values from a large set (often a continuous set) to output values in a (countable) smaller set, often with a finite number of elements. Rounding and t ...

to the output. This can be reduced, but not entirely eliminated, only at the expense of increasing the channel bandwidth requirement.

Communication channels

The term "channel" has two different meanings. In one meaning, a channel is the physical medium that carries a signal between the transmitter and the receiver. Examples of this include the atmosphere for sound communications, glass

s for some kinds of

optical communications Optical communication, also known as optical telecommunication, is communication at a distance using light to carry information. It can be performed visually or by using electronic devices. The earliest basic forms of optical communication date ...

, coaxial cables for communications by way of the voltages and electric currents in them, and

free space A vacuum is a space devoid of matter. The word is derived from the Latin adjective ''vacuus'' for "vacant" or "void". An approximation to such vacuum is a region with a gaseous pressure much less than atmospheric pressure. Physicists often dis ...

for communications using

visible light Light or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that can be perceived by the human eye. Visible light is usually defined as having wavelengths in the range of 400–700 nanometres (nm), corresponding to frequencies of 750–420 te ...

infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from around ...

waves,

ultraviolet light Ultraviolet (UV) is a form of electromagnetic radiation with wavelength from 10 nanometer, nm (with a corresponding frequency around 30 Hertz, PHz) to 400 nm (750 Hertz, THz), shorter than that of visible light, but longer than ...

, and radio waves. Coaxial cable types are classified by RG type or "radio guide", terminology derived from World War II. The various RG designations are used to classify the specific signal transmission applications. This last channel is called the "free space channel". The sending of radio waves from one place to another has nothing to do with the presence or absence of an atmosphere between the two. Radio waves travel through a perfect

vacuum A vacuum is a space devoid of matter. The word is derived from the Latin adjective ''vacuus'' for "vacant" or " void". An approximation to such vacuum is a region with a gaseous pressure much less than atmospheric pressure. Physicists often di ...

just as easily as they travel through air, fog, clouds, or any other kind of gas. The other meaning of the term "channel" in telecommunications is seen in the phrase

communications channel A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for informat ...

, which is a subdivision of a transmission medium so that it can be used to send multiple streams of information simultaneously. For example, one radio station can broadcast radio waves into free space at frequencies in the neighborhood of 94.5

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...

(megahertz) while another radio station can simultaneously broadcast radio waves at frequencies in the neighborhood of 96.1 MHz. Each radio station would transmit radio waves over a frequency

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

of about 180 kHz (kilohertz), centered at frequencies such as the above, which are called the "carrier frequencies". Each station in this example is separated from its adjacent stations by 200 kHz, and the difference between 200 kHz and 180 kHz (20 kHz) is an engineering allowance for the imperfections in the communication system. In the example above, the "free space channel" has been divided into communications channels according to frequencies, and each channel is assigned a separate frequency bandwidth in which to broadcast radio waves. This system of dividing the medium into channels according to frequency is called "

frequency-division multiplexing In telecommunications, frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) is a technique by which the total bandwidth available in a communication medium is divided into a series of non-overlapping frequency bands, each of which is used to carry a separat ...

". Another term for the same concept is " wavelength-division multiplexing", which is more commonly used in optical communications when multiple transmitters share the same physical medium. Another way of dividing a communications medium into channels is to allocate each sender a recurring segment of time (a "time slot", for example, 20

milliseconds A millisecond (from ''milli-'' and second; symbol: ms) is a unit of time in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one thousandth (0.001 or 10−3 or 1/1000) of a second and to 1000 microseconds. A unit of 10 milliseconds may be called ...

out of each second), and to allow each sender to send messages only within its own time slot. This method of dividing the medium into communication channels is called " time-division multiplexing" (TDM), and is used in optical fibre communication. Some radio communication systems use TDM within an allocated FDM channel. Hence, these systems use a hybrid of TDM and FDM.

Modulation

The shaping of a signal to convey information is known as modulation. Modulation can be used to represent a digital message as an analog waveform. This is commonly called "keying"—a term derived from the older use of Morse Code in telecommunications—and several keying techniques exist (these include phase-shift keying, frequency-shift keying, and

amplitude-shift keying Amplitude-shift keying (ASK) is a form of amplitude modulation that represents digital data as variations in the amplitude of a carrier wave. In an ASK system, a symbol, representing one or more bits, is sent by transmitting a fixed-amplitude car ...

). The "

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

" system, for example, uses phase-shift keying to exchange information between various devices. In addition, there are combinations of phase-shift keying and amplitude-shift keying which is called (in the jargon of the field) "

quadrature amplitude modulation Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is the name of a family of digital modulation methods and a related family of analog modulation methods widely used in modern telecommunications to transmit information. It conveys two analog message signa ...

" (QAM) that are used in high-capacity digital radio communication systems. Modulation can also be used to transmit the information of low-frequency analog signals at higher frequencies. This is helpful because low-frequency analog signals cannot be effectively transmitted over free space. Hence the information from a low-frequency analog signal must be impressed into a higher-frequency signal (known as the "

carrier wave In telecommunications, a carrier wave, carrier signal, or just carrier, is a waveform (usually sinusoidal) that is modulated (modified) with an information-bearing signal for the purpose of conveying information. This carrier wave usually has ...

") before transmission. There are several different modulation schemes available to achieve this wo_of_the_most_basic_being_amplitude_modulation_(AM)_and_frequency_modulation.html" ;"title="amplitude_modulation.html" ;"title="wo of the most basic being amplitude modulation">wo of the most basic being amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation">amplitude_modulation.html" ;"title="wo of the most basic being amplitude modulation">wo of the most basic being amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM)]. An example of this process is a disc jockey's voice being impressed into a 96 MHz carrier wave using frequency modulation (the voice would then be received on a radio as the channel "96 FM"). In addition, modulation has the advantage that it may use frequency division multiplexing (FDM).

Telecommunication networks

telecommunications network A telecommunications network is a group of nodes interconnected by telecommunications links that are used to exchange messages between the nodes. The links may use a variety of technologies based on the methodologies of circuit switching, mes ...

is a collection of transmitters, receivers, and

s that send messages to one another. Some digital communications networks contain one or more routers that work together to transmit information to the correct user. An analog communications network consists of one or more

switches In electrical engineering, a switch is an electrical component that can disconnect or connect the conducting path in an electrical circuit, interrupting the electric current or diverting it from one conductor to another. The most common type of ...

that establish a connection between two or more users. For both types of networks,

repeater In telecommunications, a repeater is an electronic device that receives a signal and retransmits it. Repeaters are used to extend transmissions so that the signal can cover longer distances or be received on the other side of an obstruction. Som ...

s may be necessary to amplify or recreate the signal when it is being transmitted over long distances. This is to combat

attenuation In physics, attenuation (in some contexts, extinction) is the gradual loss of flux intensity through a medium. For instance, dark glasses attenuate sunlight, lead attenuates X-rays, and water and air attenuate both light and sound at variabl ...

that can render the signal indistinguishable from the noise.ATIS Telecom Glossary 2000
, ATIS Committee T1A1 Performance and Signal Processing (approved by the American National Standards Institute), 28 February 2001. Another advantage of digital systems over analog is that their output is easier to store in memory, i.e. two voltage states (high and low) are easier to store than a continuous range of states.

Societal impact

Telecommunication has a significant social, cultural and economic impact on modern society. In 2008, estimates placed the

telecommunication industry The telecommunications industries within the sector of information and communication technology is made up of all telecommunications/telephone companies and internet service providers and plays a crucial role in the evolution of mobile communication ...

's revenue at US$4.7 trillion or just under three percent of the

gross world product The gross world product (GWP) is the combined gross national income of all the countries in the world. Because imports and exports balance exactly when considering the whole world, this also equals the total global gross domestic product (GDP).Se ...

(official exchange rate). Several following sections discuss the impact of telecommunication on society.

Microeconomics

On the microeconomic scale, companies have used telecommunications to help build global business empires. This is self-evident in the case of online retailer

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econo ...

but, according to academic Edward Lenert, even the conventional retailer

Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...

has benefited from better telecommunication infrastructure compared to its competitors. In cities throughout the world, home owners use their telephones to order and arrange a variety of home services ranging from pizza deliveries to electricians. Even relatively poor communities have been noted to use telecommunication to their advantage. In

Bangladesh Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million people in an area of . Bangladesh is among the mos ...

Narsingdi District Narsingdi District ( bn, নরসিংদী জেলা) is a district in central Bangladesh. It is located 50 km north-east of Dhaka, capital city of Bangladesh. It is a part of the Dhaka Division. The district is famous for its textile ...

, isolated villagers use cellular phones to speak directly to wholesalers and arrange a better price for their goods. In Côte d'Ivoire, coffee growers share mobile phones to follow hourly variations in coffee prices and sell at the best price.

Macroeconomics

On the

macroeconomic Macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix ''makro-'' meaning "large" + ''economics'') is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, and ...

scale, Lars-Hendrik Röller and Leonard Waverman suggested a causal link between good telecommunication infrastructure and economic growth. Few dispute the existence of a correlation although some argue it is wrong to view the relationship as causal. Because of the economic benefits of good telecommunication infrastructure, there is increasing worry about the inequitable access to telecommunication services amongst various countries of the world—this is known as the digital divide. A 2003 survey by the

International Telecommunication Union The International Telecommunication Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Unio ...

(ITU) revealed that roughly a third of countries have fewer than one mobile subscription for every 20 people and one-third of countries have fewer than one land-line telephone subscription for every 20 people. In terms of Internet access, roughly half of all countries have fewer than one out of 20 people with Internet access. From this information, as well as educational data, the ITU was able to compile an index that measures the overall ability of citizens to access and use information and communication technologies. Using this measure, Sweden, Denmark and

Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its s ...

received the highest ranking while the African countries Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mali received the lowest.

Social impact

Telecommunication has played a significant role in social relationships. Nevertheless, devices like the telephone system were originally advertised with an emphasis on the practical dimensions of the device (such as the ability to conduct business or order home services) as opposed to the social dimensions. It was not until the late 1920s and 1930s that the social dimensions of the device became a prominent theme in telephone advertisements. New promotions started appealing to consumers' emotions, stressing the importance of social conversations and staying connected to family and friends.Fischer, Claude S. Touch Someone': The Telephone Industry Discovers Sociability." Technology and Culture 29.1 (January 1988): 32–61. . . Since then the role that telecommunications has played in social relations has become increasingly important. In recent years, the popularity of social networking sites has increased dramatically. These sites allow users to communicate with each other as well as post photographs, events and profiles for others to see. The profiles can list a person's age, interests, sexual preference and relationship status. In this way, these sites can play important role in everything from organising social engagements to

courtship Courtship is the period wherein some couples get to know each other prior to a possible marriage. Courtship traditionally may begin after a betrothal and may conclude with the celebration of marriage. A courtship may be an informal and private m ...

. Prior to social networking sites, technologies like short message service (SMS) and the telephone also had a significant impact on social interactions. In 2000, market research group

Ipsos MORI Ipsos MORI was the name of a market research company based in London, England which is now known as Ipsos and still continues as the UK arm of the global Ipsos group. It was formed by a merger of Ipsos UK and MORI in October 2005. The company ...

reported that 81% of 15- to 24-year-old SMS users in the United Kingdom had used the service to coordinate social arrangements and 42% to flirt.

Entertainment, news, and advertising

In cultural terms, telecommunication has increased the public's ability to access music and film. With television, people can watch films they have not seen before in their own home without having to travel to the video store or cinema. With radio and the Internet, people can listen to music they have not heard before without having to travel to the music store. Telecommunication has also transformed the way people receive their news. A 2006 survey (right table) of slightly more than 3,000 Americans by the non-profit Pew Internet and American Life Project in the United States the majority specified television or radio over newspapers. Telecommunication has had an equally significant impact on advertising.

TNS Media Intelligence Kantar TNS is a global market research and market information group with offices in over 80 countries. Formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange and a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index, the firm was acquired by WPP Group for £1.6 billion in ...

reported that in 2007, 58% of advertising expenditure in the United States was spent on media that depend upon telecommunication.

Regulation

Many countries have enacted legislation which conforms to the International Telecommunication Regulations established by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which is the "leading UN agency for information and communication technology issues". In 1947, at the Atlantic City Conference, the ITU decided to "afford international protection to all frequencies registered in a new international frequency list and used in conformity with the Radio Regulation". According to the ITU's ''Radio Regulations'' adopted in Atlantic City, all frequencies referenced in the ''International Frequency Registration Board'', examined by the board and registered on the ''International Frequency List'' "shall have the right to international protection from harmful interference". From a global perspective, there have been political debates and legislation regarding the management of telecommunication and broadcasting. The

history of broadcasting It is generally recognized that the first radio transmission was made from a temporary station set up by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895 on the Isle of Wight. This followed on from pioneering work in the field by a number of people including Alessa ...

discusses some debates in relation to balancing conventional communication such as printing and telecommunication such as radio broadcasting. The onset of

brought on the first explosion of international broadcasting propaganda. Countries, their governments, insurgents, terrorists, and militiamen have all used telecommunication and broadcasting techniques to promote propaganda. Patriotic propaganda for political movements and colonization started the mid-1930s. In 1936, the BBC broadcast propaganda to the Arab World to partly counter similar broadcasts from Italy, which also had colonial interests in North Africa. Modern insurgents, such as those in the latest

Iraq War {{Infobox military conflict , conflict = Iraq War {{Nobold, {{lang, ar, حرب العراق (Arabic) {{Nobold, {{lang, ku, شەڕی عێراق ( Kurdish) , partof = the Iraq conflict and the War on terror , image ...

, often use intimidating telephone calls, SMSs and the distribution of sophisticated videos of an attack on coalition troops within hours of the operation. "The Sunni insurgents even have their own television station, Al-Zawraa, which while banned by the Iraqi government, still broadcasts from Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, even as coalition pressure has forced it to switch satellite hosts several times."Garfield, Andrew.
The U.S. Counter-propaganda Failure in Iraq
", Fall 2007, ''The Middle East Quarterly'', Volume XIV: Number 4, Accessed 21 July 2009. On 10 November 2014,

President Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...

recommended the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdicti ...

reclassify broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service to preserve

net neutrality Network neutrality, often referred to as net neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, offering users and online content providers consistent rates irrespective of co ...

Modern media

Worldwide equipment sales

According to data collected by Gartner and Ars Technica sales of main consumer's telecommunication equipment worldwide in millions of units was:

Telephone

In a telephone network, the caller is connected to the person to whom they wish to talk by switches at various

telephone exchanges telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital syste ...

. The switches form an electrical connection between the two users and the setting of these switches is determined electronically when the caller dials the number. Once the connection is made, the caller's voice is transformed to an electrical signal using a small

microphone A microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike (), is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publ ...

in the caller's

handset A handset is a component of a telephone that a user holds to the ear and mouth to receive audio through the receiver and speak to the remote party using the built-in transmitter. In earlier telephones, the transmitter was mounted directly on ...

. This electrical signal is then sent through the network to the user at the other end where it is transformed back into sound by a small

speaker Speaker may refer to: Society and politics * Speaker (politics), the presiding officer in a legislative assembly * Public speaker, one who gives a speech or lecture * A person producing speech: the producer of a given utterance, especially: ** I ...

in that person's handset. As of 2015, the landline telephones in most residential homes are analog—that is, the speaker's voice directly determines the signal's voltage. Although short-distance calls may be handled from end-to-end as analog signals, increasingly telephone service providers are transparently converting the signals to digital signals for transmission. The advantage of this is that digitized voice data can travel side by side with data from the Internet and can be perfectly reproduced in long-distance communication (as opposed to analog signals that are inevitably impacted by noise). Mobile phones have had a significant impact on telephone networks. Mobile phone subscriptions now outnumber fixed-line subscriptions in many markets. Sales of mobile phones in 2005 totalled 816.6 million with that figure being almost equally shared amongst the markets of Asia/Pacific (204 m), Western Europe (164 m), CEMEA (Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa) (153.5 m), North America (148 m) and Latin America (102 m). In terms of new subscriptions over the five years from 1999, Africa has outpaced other markets with 58.2% growth. Increasingly these phones are being serviced by systems where the voice content is transmitted digitally such as

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such ...

W-CDMA The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM standard. Developed and maintained by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), UMTS is a component of the Int ...

with many markets choosing to deprecate analog systems such as AMPS. There have also been dramatic changes in telephone communication behind the scenes. Starting with the operation of

TAT-8 TAT-8 was the 8th transatlantic communications cable and first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, carrying 280 Mbit/s (40,000 telephone circuits) between the United States, United Kingdom and France. It was constructed in 1988 by a consortium of com ...

in 1988, the 1990s saw the widespread adoption of systems based on optical fibers. The benefit of communicating with optical fibers is that they offer a drastic increase in data capacity. TAT-8 itself was able to carry 10 times as many telephone calls as the last copper cable laid at that time and today's optical fibre cables are able to carry 25 times as many telephone calls as TAT-8. This increase in data capacity is due to several factors: First, optical fibres are physically much smaller than competing technologies. Second, they do not suffer from crosstalk which means several hundred of them can be easily bundled together in a single cable. Lastly, improvements in multiplexing have led to an exponential growth in the data capacity of a single fibre. Assisting communication across many modern optical fibre networks is a protocol known as

Asynchronous Transfer Mode Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a telecommunications standard defined by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ITU-T (formerly CCITT) for digital transmission of multiple types of traffic. ATM was developed to meet the needs of ...

(ATM). The ATM protocol allows for the side-by-side

data transmission Data transmission and data reception or, more broadly, data communication or digital communications is the transfer and reception of data in the form of a digital bitstream or a digitized analog signal transmitted over a point-to-point o ...

mentioned in the second paragraph. It is suitable for public telephone networks because it establishes a pathway for data through the network and associates a

traffic contract If a network service (or application) wishes to use a broadband network (an ATM network in particular) to transport a particular kind of traffic, it must first inform the network about what kind of traffic is to be transported, and the performan ...

with that pathway. The traffic contract is essentially an agreement between the client and the network about how the network is to handle the data; if the network cannot meet the conditions of the traffic contract it does not accept the connection. This is important because telephone calls can negotiate a contract so as to guarantee themselves a constant bit rate, something that will ensure a caller's voice is not delayed in parts or cut off completely. There are competitors to ATM, such as

Multiprotocol Label Switching Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a routing technique in telecommunications networks that directs data from one node to the next based on labels rather than network addresses. Whereas network addresses identify endpoints the labels identif ...

(MPLS), that perform a similar task and are expected to supplant ATM in the future.

Radio and television

In a broadcast system, the central high-powered broadcast tower transmits a high-frequency

electromagnetic wave In physics, electromagnetic radiation (EMR) consists of waves of the electromagnetic (EM) field, which propagate through space and carry momentum and electromagnetic radiant energy. It includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared, (visib ...

to numerous low-powered receivers. The high-frequency wave sent by the tower is modulated with a signal containing visual or audio information. The receiver is then tuned so as to pick up the high-frequency wave and a demodulator is used to retrieve the signal containing the visual or audio information. The broadcast signal can be either analog (signal is varied continuously with respect to the information) or digital (information is encoded as a set of discrete values). The broadcast media industry is at a critical turning point in its development, with many countries moving from analog to digital broadcasts. This move is made possible by the production of cheaper, faster and more capable integrated circuits. The chief advantage of digital broadcasts is that they prevent a number of complaints common to traditional analog broadcasts. For television, this includes the elimination of problems such as snowy pictures, ghosting and other distortion. These occur because of the nature of analog transmission, which means that perturbations due to noise will be evident in the final output. Digital transmission overcomes this problem because digital signals are reduced to discrete values upon reception and hence small perturbations do not affect the final output. In a simplified example, if a binary message 1011 was transmitted with signal amplitudes .0 0.0 1.0 1.0and received with signal amplitudes

.9 0.2 1.1 0.9 '' 0.9'' is the fourth studio album by French rapper Booba. 0.9 may also refer to: *0.9, a fractional number *0. or 0.999..., a repeating decimal {{numberdis ...

it would still decode to the binary message 1011— a perfect reproduction of what was sent. From this example, a problem with digital transmissions can also be seen in that if the noise is great enough it can significantly alter the decoded message. Using forward error correction a receiver can correct a handful of bit errors in the resulting message but too much noise will lead to incomprehensible output and hence a breakdown of the transmission. In digital television broadcasting, there are three competing standards that are likely to be adopted worldwide. These are the ATSC,

DVB Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) is a set of international open standards for digital television. DVB standards are maintained by the DVB Project, an international industry consortium, and are published by a Joint Technical Committee (JTC) o ...

and ISDB standards; the adoption of these standards thus far is presented in the captioned map. All three standards use MPEG-2 for video compression. ATSC uses Dolby Digital AC-3 for audio compression, ISDB uses

Advanced Audio Coding Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate. AAC has been stan ...

(MPEG-2 Part 7) and DVB has no standard for audio compression but typically uses

MPEG-1 MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively) without excessive quality loss, making ...

Part 3 Layer 2. The choice of modulation also varies between the schemes. In digital audio broadcasting, standards are much more unified with practically all countries choosing to adopt the

Digital Audio Broadcasting Digital radio is the use of digital technology to transmit or receive across the radio spectrum. Digital transmission by radio waves includes digital broadcasting, and especially digital audio radio services. Types In digital broadcasting sy ...

standard (also known as the

Eureka 147 Eureka (often abbreviated as E!, or Σ!) is an intergovernmental organisation for research and development funding and coordination. Eureka is an open platform for international cooperation in innovation. Organisations and companies applying th ...

standard). The exception is the United States which has chosen to adopt HD Radio. HD Radio, unlike Eureka 147, is based upon a transmission method known as

in-band on-channel In-band on-channel (IBOC) is a hybrid method of transmitting digital radio and analog radio broadcast signals simultaneously on the same frequency. The name refers to the new digital signals being broadcast in the same AM or FM band (in-band) ...

transmission that allows digital information to "piggyback" on normal AM or FM analog transmissions. However, despite the pending switch to digital, analog television remains being transmitted in most countries. An exception is the United States that ended analog television transmission (by all but the very low-power TV stations) on 12 June 2009 after twice delaying the switchover deadline. Kenya also ended analog television transmission in December 2014 after multiple delays. For analog television, there were three standards in use for broadcasting color TV (see a map on adoption

here Here is an adverb that means "in, on, or at this place". It may also refer to: Software * Here Technologies, a mapping company * Here WeGo (formerly Here Maps), a mobile app and map website by Here Technologies, Here Television * Here TV (form ...

). These are known as

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

(German designed),

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

(American designed), and

SECAM SECAM, also written SÉCAM (, ''Séquentiel de couleur à mémoire'', French for ''color sequential with memory''), is an analog color television system that was used in France, some parts of Europe and Africa, and Russia. It was one of th ...

(French-designed). For analog radio, the switch to digital radio is made more difficult by the higher cost of digital receivers. The choice of modulation for analog radio is typically between amplitude (AM) or frequency modulation (FM). To achieve stereo playback, an amplitude modulated subcarrier is used for stereo FM, and quadrature amplitude modulation is used for stereo AM or C-QUAM.

Internet

The Internet is a worldwide network of computers and computer networks that communicate with each other using the

Internet Protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. ...

(IP). Any computer on the Internet has a unique

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

that can be used by other computers to route information to it. Hence, any computer on the Internet can send a message to any other computer using its IP address. These messages carry with them the originating computer's IP address allowing for two-way communication. The Internet is thus an exchange of messages between computers. It is estimated that 51% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 2000 were flowing through the Internet (most of the rest (42%) through the

landline telephone A landline (land line, land-line, main line, home phone, fixed-line, and wireline) is a telephone connection that uses metal wires or optical fiber telephone line for transmission, as distinguished from a mobile cellular network, which uses ...

). By 2007 the Internet clearly dominated and captured 97% of all the information in telecommunication networks (most of the rest (2%) through mobile phones). , an estimated 21.9% of the world population has access to the Internet with the highest access rates (measured as a percentage of the population) in North America (73.6%), Oceania/Australia (59.5%) and Europe (48.1%). In terms of

broadband access Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...

, Iceland (26.7%), South Korea (25.4%) and the Netherlands (25.3%) led the world. The Internet works in part because of

protocols Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technology ...

that govern how the computers and routers communicate with each other. The nature of computer network communication lends itself to a layered approach where individual protocols in the protocol stack run more-or-less independently of other protocols. This allows lower-level protocols to be customized for the network situation while not changing the way higher-level protocols operate. A practical example of why this is important is because it allows an

Internet browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

to run the same code regardless of whether the computer it is running on is connected to the Internet through an Ethernet or

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio wav ...

connection. Protocols are often talked about in terms of their place in the OSI reference model (pictured on the right), which emerged in 1983 as the first step in an unsuccessful attempt to build a universally adopted networking protocol suite. For the Internet, the physical medium and data link protocol can vary several times as packets traverse the globe. This is because the Internet places no constraints on what physical medium or data link protocol is used. This leads to the adoption of media and protocols that best suit the local network situation. In practice, most intercontinental communication will use the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocol (or a modern equivalent) on top of optic fiber. This is because for most intercontinental communication the Internet shares the same infrastructure as the public switched telephone network. At the network layer, things become standardized with the Internet Protocol (IP) being adopted for

logical address In computing, a logical address is the address at which an item ( memory cell, storage element, network host) appears to reside from the perspective of an executing application program. A logical address may be different from the physical addr ...

ing. For the World Wide Web, these "IP addresses" are derived from the human-readable form using the

Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned t ...

(e.g. 72.14.207.99 is derived from www.google.com). At the moment, the most widely used version of the Internet Protocol is version four but a move to version six is imminent. At the transport layer, most communication adopts either the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) or the

User Datagram Protocol In computer networking, the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core communication protocols of the Internet protocol suite used to send messages (transported as datagrams in packets) to other hosts on an Internet Protocol (IP) network ...

(UDP). TCP is used when it is essential every message sent is received by the other computer whereas UDP is used when it is merely desirable. With TCP, packets are retransmitted if they are lost and placed in order before they are presented to higher layers. With UDP, packets are not ordered nor retransmitted if lost. Both TCP and UDP packets carry

port numbers In computer networking, a port is a number assigned to uniquely identify a connection endpoint and to direct data to a specific service. At the software level, within an operating system, a port is a logical construct that identifies a specific ...

with them to specify what application or

process A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management *Business process, activities that produce a specific se ...

the packet should be handled by. Because certain application-level protocols use certain ports, network administrators can manipulate traffic to suit particular requirements. Examples are to restrict Internet access by blocking the traffic destined for a particular port or to affect the performance of certain applications by assigning priority. Above the transport layer, there are certain protocols that are sometimes used and loosely fit in the session and presentation layers, most notably the

Secure Sockets Layer Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...

(SSL) and

Transport Layer Security Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...

(TLS) protocols. These protocols ensure that data transferred between two parties remains completely confidential. Finally, at the application layer, are many of the protocols Internet users would be familiar with such as

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

(web browsing),

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common ...

(e-mail),

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

(file transfer),

IRC Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a text-based chat system for instant messaging. IRC is designed for group communication in discussion forums, called '' channels'', but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat an ...

(Internet chat), BitTorrent (file sharing) and

XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP, originally named Jabber) is an open communication protocol designed for instant messaging (IM), presence information, and contact list maintenance. Based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), i ...

(instant messaging).

Voice over Internet Protocol Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...

(VoIP) allows data packets to be used for

synchronous Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or ''in time''. Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchronou ...

voice communications. The data packets are marked as voice type packets and can be prioritized by the network administrators so that the real-time, synchronous conversation is less subject to contention with other types of data traffic which can be delayed (i.e. file transfer or email) or buffered in advance (i.e. audio and video) without detriment. That prioritization is fine when the network has sufficient capacity for all the VoIP calls taking place at the same time and the network is enabled for prioritization i.e. a private corporate-style network, but the Internet is not generally managed in this way and so there can be a big difference in the quality of VoIP calls over a private network and over the public Internet.

Local area networks and wide area networks

Despite the growth of the Internet, the characteristics of

s (LANs)—computer networks that do not extend beyond a few kilometres—remain distinct. This is because networks on this scale do not require all the features associated with larger networks and are often more cost-effective and efficient without them. When they are not connected with the Internet, they also have the advantages of privacy and security. However, purposefully lacking a direct connection to the Internet does not provide assured protection from hackers, military forces, or economic powers. These threats exist if there are any methods for connecting remotely to the LAN.

Wide area network A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographic area. Wide area networks are often established with leased telecommunication circuits. Businesses, as well as schools and government entities, u ...

s (WANs) are private computer networks that may extend for thousands of kilometres. Once again, some of their advantages include privacy and security. Prime users of private LANs and WANs include armed forces and intelligence agencies that must keep their information secure and secret. In the mid-1980s, several sets of communication protocols emerged to fill the gaps between the data-link layer and the application layer of the OSI reference model. These included AppleTalk,

IPX Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX) is the network layer protocol in the IPX/SPX protocol suite. IPX is derived from Xerox Network Systems' IDP. It also has the ability to act as a transport layer protocol. The IPX/SPX protocol suite was very p ...

, and

NetBIOS NetBIOS () is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System. It provides services related to the session layer of the OSI model allowing applications on separate computers to communicate over a local area network. As strictly an API, Ne ...

with the dominant protocol set during the early 1990s being IPX due to its popularity with

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

users.

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

existed at this point, but it was typically only used by large government and research facilities. As the Internet grew in popularity and its traffic was required to be routed into private networks, the TCP/IP protocols replaced existing local area network technologies. Additional technologies, such as

DHCP The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network management protocol used on Internet Protocol (IP) networks for automatically assigning IP addresses and other communication parameters to devices connected to the network using a cli ...

, allowed TCP/IP-based computers to self-configure in the network. Such functions also existed in the AppleTalk/ IPX/ NetBIOS protocol sets. Whereas Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) are typical data-link protocols for larger networks such as WANs; Ethernet and Token Ring are typical data-link protocols for LANs. These protocols differ from the former protocols in that they are simpler, e.g., they omit features such as

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

guarantees, and offer

medium access control In IEEE 802 LAN/MAN standards, the medium access control (MAC, also called media access control) sublayer is the layer that controls the hardware responsible for interaction with the wired, optical or wireless transmission medium. The MAC sublay ...

. Both of these differences allow for more economical systems. Despite the modest popularity of Token Ring in the 1980s and 1990s, virtually all LANs now use either wired or wireless Ethernet facilities. At the physical layer, most wired Ethernet implementations use copper twisted-pair cables (including the common 10BASE-T networks). However, some early implementations used heavier coaxial cables and some recent implementations (especially high-speed ones) use optical fibers. When optic fibers are used, the distinction must be made between multimode fibers and single-mode fibers. Multimode fibers can be thought of as thicker optical fibers that are cheaper to manufacture devices for, but that suffer from less usable bandwidth and worse attenuation—implying poorer long-distance performance.Fiber Optic Cable Tutorial
, Arc Electronics. Retrieved June 2007.

References

Citations

Bibliography

* Goggin, Gerard, ''Global Mobile Media'' (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 176. . *

OECD The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; french: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, ''OCDE'') is an intergovernmental organisation with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate e ...

''Universal Service and Rate Restructuring in Telecommunications''
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Publishing, 1991. . * Wheen, Andrew. ''Dot-Dash to Dot.Com: How Modern Telecommunications Evolved from the Telegraph to the Internet'' (Springer, 2011).

External links

International Teletraffic Congress

International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

ATIS Telecom Glossary

Federal Communications Commission

IEEE Communications Society

International Telecommunication Union
* (Ericsson removed the book from their site in September 2005) {{Authority control Economics of transport and utility industries Mass media technology ja:通信

Etymology

History

Beacons and pigeons

Telegraph and telephone

Radio and television

Thermionic valves

Computer networks and the Internet

Growth of transmission capacity

Technical concepts

Basic elements

Analog versus digital communications

Communication channels

Modulation

Telecommunication networks

Societal impact

Microeconomics

Macroeconomics

Social impact

Entertainment, news, and advertising

Regulation

Modern media

Worldwide equipment sales

Telephone

Radio and television

Internet

Local area networks and wide area networks

See also

References

Citations

Bibliography

External links