Basics of Telecommunication

Telecommunication Basics of Telecommunications Telecommunications can be briefly defined as the ability to communicate over a distance with the aid of some form of technology. This technology utilizes electric signals or electromagnetic waves or some combination of the two. There were other forms of long distance communication before modern technology, such as smoke signals, but all modern forms typically involve electric technology or radio waves. This technology has become intertwined in modern life and touches nearly everyone's life across the globe.

It has been estimated that mobile technology and smart devices are responsible for the recent growth and mobile broadband has in fact become the fastest growth area for the overall telecoms sector (Budde Comm, 2014). The basics of a telecommunication system always include three essential elements. There is first the transmitter which takes a form of information and coverts it to some form of a signal. The next is the transmission medium in which the converted signal travels.

And finally there must be a receiver that can capture this signal and covert it back to some form of useful information. Figure 1 - Basic Components of Telecommunications (CDC, 2013) Although these basic components must be present in every form of modern telecommunication system, today's systems are far more complex.

For example, a cell phone may transmit over the air to a cell tower, which transfers the signal to a telephone line, and then to a different cell tower, and finally over the air to another cell phone; the connection between the sender and the receiver involves multiple physical communication links from the user's phone, to the cell tower, to the phone line, through the telephone system, back to another cell tower, and finally to the receiver's phone and these multiple link systems are called networks (CDC, 2013).

Networks can be incredibly complex. The distance between two points in the network can be a limiting factor as well as the number of times a signal has to change forms. At many points in a network there has to be a retransmission of the signal to amplify it and reduce noise in the medium so that the signal can be clear to the end recipient.

To accomplish in networks, the network has to include some kind of node repeater that can make a clear signal span the entire length of the network. Communication signals can either be composed of digital or analog signals. These two signal mediums are substantially different. The analog system is varied continually based on the information in the signal it's carrying while the.