Telecommunications

The term telecommunications refers to the process by which signals are transmitted over a distance for the purpose of sending and receiving messages. From the mid 20th century to today telecommunications is the sending and receiving of electromagnetic and electronic waves that are interpreted and presented by transmitters and receivers. The basic components of a telecommunications system include the transmitter that acts as the signal interpreter that coverts signals into information that is interpretable by the receiver (Huynh 2001). The second component of a telecommunications system is the transmission medium which is the messages are sent and received on. This area of telecommunications systems has seen the most exponential growth and creativity in terms of growth with wireless and WiFI being the most rapidly growing transmission medium in use today (Huynh 2001). The third component of a telecommunications system is the receiver, which converts both initiated and responded-to messages in an interpretable format that can be quickly viewed, understood and acted upon by the initiator. The development and fine-tuning of analogue and digital approaches to coding, transmitting and interpreting data continues to advance in response to the increased needs of Internet-based and local-area network-based communications architectures. In addition there continues to be a rapid definition of communications standards for ensuring the highest level of compatibility on each communications medium and platform. The adoption of the Open Systems Interconnect Model (OSI) is a case in point, as is the continued development of WiFI standards throughout the wireless community ((Huynh 2001). Data communications' adoption rates regarding the Internet's wireless and metropolitan Wide-Area Networks including WiFI technologies have a growth rate that dwarfs even the adoption of television in the last century. Data communications' continued growth is going to continually lead to new industry advances and standards.

Reference:

Huynh (2001) - Network Fundamentals: Intro to Network Structure and Protocol LAN, WAN, TCP/IP National Center for Biotechnology Information National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health. Presented by Chuong Huynh. Accessed from the Internet on September 8, 2007 from location:

http://www.dbbm.fiocruz.br/class/Lecture/d01/network_fundamental/fundamental_networking.ppt