Encyclopedia
Telecommunication is the transmission of signals over a distance for the purpose of communication. In modern times, this process almost always involves the sending of
electromagnetic waves by electronic transmitters but in earlier years it may have involved the use of smoke signals,
drums or
semaphore. Today, telecommunication is widespread and devices that assist the process such as the
television,
radio and
telephone are common in many parts of the world. There is also a vast array of networks that connect these devices, including
computer networks, public telephone networks, radio networks and television networks. Computer communication across the
Internet, such as
e-mail and
instant messaging, is just one of many examples of telecommunication.
Telecommunication systems are generally designed by
telecommunication engineers. Major contributors to the field of telecommunications include
Alexander Bell who invented the telephone ,
John Logie Baird who invented the mechanical television and
Guglielmo Marconi who first demonstrated transatlantic radio communication. In recent times,
optical fibre has radically improved the bandwidth available for intercontential communication helping to facilitate a faster and richer Internet experience and digital television has eliminated effects such as snowy pictures and ghosting. Telecommunication remains an important part of the world economy and the telecommunication industry's revenue has been placed at just under 3% of the gross world product.
Key concepts
The basic elements of a telecommunication system are:
...
over which the signal is transmitted
- a receiver that receives and converts the signal back into usable information
For example, consider a radio broadcast. In this case the
broadcast tower is the transmitter, the
radio is the receiver and the transmission medium is free space. Often telecommunication systems are two-way and devices act as both a transmitter and receiver or
transceiver. For example, a
mobile phone is a transceiver. Telecommunication over a phone line is called point-to-point communication because it is between one transmitter and one receiver, telecommunication through radio broadcasts is called broadcast communication because it is between one powerful transmitter and numerous receivers.
Signals can either be analogue or digital. In an analogue signal, the signal is varied continuously with respect to the information. In a digital signal, the information is encoded as a set of discrete values .
A collection of transmitters, receivers or transceivers that communicate with each other is known as a network. Digital networks may consist of one or more
routers that route data to the correct user. An analogue network may consist of one or more
switches that establish a connection between two or more users. For both types of network, a
repeater may be necessary to amplify or recreate the signal when it is being transmitted over long distances. This is to combat attenuation that can render the signal indistinguishable from noise.
A channel is a division in a transmission medium so that it can be used to send multiple independent streams of data. For example, a radio station may broadcast at 96 MHz while another radio station may broadcast at 94.5 MHz. In this case the medium has been divided by
frequency and each channel received a separate frequency to broadcast on. Alternatively one could allocate each channel a recurring segment of time over which to broadcast.
However, more relevant to earlier discussion, modulation is also used to boost the frequency of analogue signals. This is because a raw signal is often not suitable for transmission over long distances of free space due to its low frequencies. Hence its information must be superimposed on a higher frequency signal before transmission. There are several different modulation schemes available to achieve this — some of the most basic being
amplitude modulation and
frequency modulation. An example of this process is a
DJ's voice being superimposed on a 96 MHz carrier wave using frequency modulation .
Society and telecommunication
Telecommunication is an important part of many modern societies. In 2006, estimates place the telecommunication industry's revenue at $1.2 trillion or just under 3% of the gross world product. Good telecommunication infrastructure is widely acknowledged as important for economic success in the modern world both on a micro and macroeconomic scale. And, for this reason, there is increasing worry about the so-called digital divide. Figures such as
Kofi Annan, Jeffrey Sachs,
Al Gore,
Michael Moore and Newt Gingrich have all noted that over "half the world's population has never made or received a phone call." While this is probably true, critics note that the statement is often made without attribution to research.
That said, the truth remains that access to telecommunication systems is not equally shared amongst the world's population. A 2003 survey by the
International Telecommunication Union revealed that roughly one-third of countries have less than 1 mobile subscription for every 20 people and one-third of countries have less than 1 fixed line subscription for every 20 people. In terms of Internet access, roughly half of countries have less than 1 in 20 people with Internet access. From this information as well as educational data the ITU was able to compile a Digital Access Index that measures the overall ability of citizens to access and use information and communication technologies. Using this measure, countries such as
Sweden,
Denmark and
Iceland receive the highest ranking while African countries such as
Niger,
Burkina Faso and
Mali receive the lowest.
Further discussion of the social impact of telecommunication is often considered part of
communication theory.
History
Early telecommunications
Early forms of telecommunication include smoke signals and
drums. Drums were used by natives in
Africa,
New Guinea and
South America whereas smoke signals were used by natives in
North America and
China. Contrary to what one might think, these systems were often used to do more than merely announce the presence of a camp.
In 1792, a French engineer,
Claude Chappe built the first fixed visual telegraphy system between
Lille and
Paris. However semaphore as a communication system suffered from the need for skilled operators and expensive towers often at intervals of only ten to thirty kilometres . As a result, the last commercial line was abandoned in 1880.
Telegraph and telephone
The first commercial
electrical telegraph was constructed by Sir
Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke and opened on 9 April 1839. Both Wheatstone and Cooke viewed their device as "an improvement to the [existing] electromagnetic telegraph" not as a new device.
On the other side of the
Atlantic Ocean,
Samuel Morse independently developed a version of the electrical telegraph that he unsuccessfully demonstrated on 2 September 1837. Soon after he was joined by
Alfred Vail who developed the register — a telegraph terminal that integrated a logging device for recording messages to paper tape. This was demonstrated successfully on 6 January 1838. The first
transatlantic telegraph cable was successfully completed on 27 July 1866, allowing transatlantic telegraph communications for the first time.
The conventional telephone was invented by
Alexander Bell in 1876. Although in 1849
Antonio Meucci invented a device that allowed the electrical transmission of voice over a line. Meucci's device depended upon the electrophonic effect and was of little practical value because it required users to place the receiver in their mouth to “hear” what was being said. The first commercial telephone services were set-up in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of
New Haven and
London.
Radio and television
In 1832, James Lindsay gave a classroom demonstration of wireless telegraphy to his students. By 1854 he was able to demonstrate a transmission across the
Firth of Tay from
Dundee to Woodhaven, a distance of two miles, using water as the transmission medium. In December 1901,
Guglielmo Marconi established wireless communication between Britain and the United States earning him the
Nobel Prize in physics in 1909 .
On March 25, 1925,
John Logie Baird was able to demonstrate the transmission of moving pictures at the London department store
Selfridges. Baird's device relied upon the
Nipkow disk and thus became known as the
mechanical television. It formed the basis of experimental broadcasts done by the
British Broadcasting Corporation beginning September 30, 1929. However for most of the twentieth century televisions depended upon the cathode ray tube invented by
Karl Braun. The first version of such a television to show promise was produced by
Philo Farnsworth and demonstrated to his family on September 7, 1927.
Computer networks and the Internet
On September 11, 1940
George Stibitz was able to transmit problems using
teletype to his Complex Number Calculator in
New York and receive the computed results back at
Dartmouth College in
New Hampshire. This configuration of a centralized computer or
mainframe with remote dumb terminals remained popular throughout the 1950s. However it was not until the 1960s that researchers started to investigate packet switching — a technology that would allow chunks of data to be sent to different computers without first passing through a centralized mainframe. A four-node network emerged on December 5, 1969; this network would become
ARPANET, which by 1981 would consist of 213 nodes.
ARPANET's development centred around the Request for Comment process and on April 7, 1969, RFC 1 was published. This process is important because ARPANET would eventually merge with other networks to form the
Internet and many of the protocols the Internet relies upon today were specified through this process. In September 1981, RFC 791 introduced the Internet Protocol v4 and RFC 793 introduced the
Transmission Control Protocol — thus creating the TCP/IP protocol that much of the Internet relies upon today.
However not all important developments were made through the Request for Comment process. Two popular link protocols for
local area networks also appeared in the 1970s. A patent for the
Token Ring protocol was filed by Olof Soderblom on October 29, 1974. And a paper on the
Ethernet protocol was published by Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs in the July 1976 issue of
Communications of the ACM. These protocols are discussed in more detail in the next section.
Modern operation
Telephone
Today, the fixed-line telephone systems in most residential homes remain analogue and, although short-distance calls may be handled from end-to-end as analogue signals, increasingly telephone service providers are transparently converting signals to digital before, if necessary, converting them back to analogue for reception. Mobile phones have had a dramatic impact on telephone service providers. 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 , Western Europe , CEMEA , North America and Latin America . In terms of new subscriptions over the five years from 1999, Africa has outpaced other markets with 58.2% growth compared to the next largest market, Asia, which boasted 34.3% growth. Increasingly these phones are being serviced by digital systems such as
GSM or W-CDMA with many markets choosing to depreciate analogue systems such as AMPS.
However there have been equally drastic changes in telephone communication behind the scenes. Starting with the operation of TAT-8 in 1988, the 1990s saw the widespread adoption of systems based upon
optic fibres. The benefit of communicating with optic fibres 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 optic fibre cables are able to carry 25 times as many telephone calls as TAT-8. This drastic increase in data capacity is due to several factors. First, optic 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 lead to an exponential growth in the data capacity of a single fibre. This is due to technologies such as
dense wavelength-division multiplexing, which at its most basic level is building multiple channels based upon frequency division as discussed in the
Key concepts section. However despite the advances of technologies such as dense wavelength-division multiplexing, technologies based around building multiple channels based upon time division such as Synchronous Optical Networking and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy remain dominant.
Assisting communication across these networks is a protocol known as Asynchronous Transfer Mode . As a technology, ATM arose in the 1980s and was envisioned to be part of the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network. The network ultimately failed but the technology gave birth to the ATM Forum which in 1992 published its first standard. Today, despite competitors such as
Multiprotocol Label Switching, ATM remains the protocol of choice for most major long-distance optical networks. The importance of the ATM protocol was chiefly in its notion of establishing pathways for data through the network and associating a traffic contract with these pathways. The traffic contract was essentially an agreement between the client and the network about how the network was to handle the data, if the network could not meet the conditions of the traffic contract it would not accept the connection. This was important because telephone calls could negotiate a contract so as to guarantee themselves a constant bit rate, something that was essential to ensure the call could take place without a caller's voice being delayed in parts or cut-off completely.
Radio and television
The broadcast media industry is also at a critical turning point in its development, with many countries starting to move from analogue to digital broadcasts. The chief advantage of digital broadcasts is that they prevent a number of complaints with traditional analogue broadcasts. For television, this includes the elimination of problems such as snowy pictures, ghosting and other distortion. These occur because of the nature of analogue 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 binary data 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 [1.0 0.0 1.0 1.0] and received with signal amplitudes [0.9 0.2 1.1 0.9] 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 and
ISDB standards and 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 and DVB has no standard for audio compression but typically uses MPEG-1 Part 3 Layer 2. The choice of modulation also varies between the schemes. Both DVB and ISDB use
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing for terrestrial broadcasts where as ATSC uses vestigial sideband modulation . OFDM should offer better resistance to multipath interference and the
Doppler effect . However controversial tests conducted by the United States'
National Association of Broadcasters have shown that there is little difference between the two for stationary receivers.
In digital audio broadcasting, standards are much more unified with practically all countries choosing to adopt the Digital Audio Broadcasting standard . The exception being 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 transmission — this allows digital information to "piggyback" on normal AM or FM analogue transmissions. Hence avoiding the bandwidth allocation issues of Eureka 147 and therefore being strongly advocated
National Association of Broadcasters who felt there was a lack of new spectrum to allocate for the Eureka 147 standard. In the United States the
Federal Communications Commission has chosen to leave licensing of the standard in the hands of a commercial corporation called iBiquity. An open in-band on-channel standard exists in the form of Digital Radio Mondiale however adoption of this standard is mostly limited to a handful of
shortwave broadcasts. Despite the different names all standards rely upon OFDM for modulation. In terms of audio compression, DRM typically uses
Advanced Audio Coding , DAB like DVB can use a variety of codecs but typically uses MPEG-1 Part 3 Layer 2 and HD Radio uses High-Definition Coding.
However, despite the pending switch to digital, analogue receivers still remain widespread. Analogue television is still transmitted in practically all countries. The United States had hoped to end analogue broadcasts by December 31, 2006 however this was recently pushed back to February 17, 2009. For analogue, there are three standards in use . These are known as
PAL,
NTSC and
SECAM. The basics of PAL and NTSC are very similar; a
quadrature amplitude modulated subcarrier carrying the chrominance information is added to the luminance video signal to form a
composite video baseband signal . On the other hand, the
SECAM system uses a frequency modulation scheme on its colour subcarrier. The PAL system differs from NTSC in that the phase of the video signal's colour components is reversed with each line helping to correct phase errors in the transmission. For analogue radio, the switch to digital is made more difficult by the fact that analogue receivers cost a fraction of the cost of digital receivers. For example while you can get a good analogue receiver for under $20 USD a digital receiver will set you back at least $75 USD. The choice of modulation for analogue radio is typically between
amplitude modulation or
frequency modulation . 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 .
The Internet
Today an estimated 15.7% of the world population has access to the Internet with the highest concentration in North America , Oceania/Australia and Europe . In terms of broadband access, countries such as
Iceland ,
South Korea and the
Netherlands lead the world.
The nature of computer network communication lends itself to a layered approach where individual protocols in the protocol stack run largely 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 important is because it allows an
Internet browser 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 connection. Protocols are often talked about in terms of their place in the
OSI reference model — a model that emerged in 1983 as the first step in a doomed attempt to build a universally adopted networking protocol suite. The model itself is outlined in the picture to the right. It is important to note that the Internet's protocol suite, like many modern protocol suites, does not rigidly follow this model but can still be talked about in the context of this model.
For the Internet, the physical medium and data link protocol can vary several times as packets travel between client nodes. Though it is likely that the majority of the distance travelled will be using the Asynchronous Transfer Mode data link protocol across optical fibre this is in no way guaranteed. A connection may also encounter data link protocols such as
Ethernet,
Wi-Fi and the Point-to-Point Protocol and physical media such as
twisted-pair cables and free space.
At the network layer things become standardized with the Internet Protocol being adopted for logical addressing. For the world wide web, these “IP addresses” are derived from the human readable form using the
Domain Name System. At the moment the most widely used version of the Internet Protocol is version four but a move to version six is imminent. The main advantage of the new version is that it supports 3.40 × 10
38 addresses compared to 4.29 × 10
9 addresses. The new version also adds support for enhanced security through IPSec as well as support for QoS identifiers. At the transport layer most communication adopts either the
Transmission Control Protocol or the User Datagram Protocol . 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 or retransmitted if lost. Both TCP and UDP packets carry port numbers with them to specify what application or
process the packet should be handed to on the client's computer. Because certain application-level protocols use certain ports, network administrators can restrict Internet access by blocking or throttling traffic destined for a particular port.
Above the transport layer there are certain protocols that loosely fit in the session and presentation layers and are sometimes adopted, most notably the Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security protocols. These protocols ensure that the data transferred between two parties remains completely confidential and one or the other is in use when a padlock appears at the bottom of your web browser. Security is generally based upon the principle that eavesdroppers cannot factorize very large numbers that are the composite of two primes without knowing one of the primes. Another protocol that loosely fits in the session and presentation layers is the Real-time Transport Protocol most notably used to stream QuickTime. Finally at the application layer are many of the protocols Internet users would be familiar with such as HTTP , POP3 , FTP and
IRC but also less common protocols such as
BitTorrent and
ICQ .
Local area networks
Despite the growth of the Internet, the characteristics of
local area networks remain distinct.
In the mid-1980s, several protocol suites emerged to fill the gap between the data link and applications layer of the
OSI reference model. These were Appletalk, IPX and NetBIOS with the dominant protocol suite during the early 90s being IPX due to its popularity with
MS-DOS users.
TCP/IP existed at this point but was typically only used by large government and research facilities. However as the Internet grew in popularity and a larger percentage of local area network traffic became Internet-related, LANs gradually moved towards TCP/IP and today networks mostly dedicated to TCP/IP traffic are common. The move to TCP/IP was helped by technologies such as
DHCP introduced in RFC 2131 that allowed TCP/IP clients to discover their own network address — a functionality that came standard with the AppleTalk/IPX/NetBIOS protocol suites.
However it is at the data link layer that modern local area networks diverge from the Internet. Where as Asynchronous Transfer Mode or
Multiprotocol Label Switching are typical data link protocols for larger networks,
Ethernet and
Token Ring are typical data link protocols for local area networks. The latter LAN protocols differ from the former protocols in that they are simpler and offer collision prevention. Both of these differences allow for more economic set-ups. For example, omitting Quality of Service guarantees simplifies routers and the guarantees are not really necessary for local area networks because they tend not to carry real time communication . Including collision prevention allows multiple clients to share the same cable again reducing costs. Though both Ethernet and Token Ring have different frame formats, it is in terms of collision prevention that the two present the greatest difference. With Token Ring a token circulates the network and clients only transmit when they have the token. The token must be managed to ensure it is not lost or duplicated. With Ethernet any client can transmit if it thinks the medium is idle, but clients listen for collisions and if one is detected suspend communication for a random amount of time.
Despite
Token Ring's modest popularity in the 80's and 90's, with the advent of the twenty-first century, the majority of local area networks have now settled on
Ethernet. At the physical layer most Ethernet implementations use
copper twisted-pair cables . Some early implementations used
coaxial cables. And some implementations use
optical fibres. Optical fibres are also likely to feature prominently in the forthcoming 10-gigabit Ethernet implementations. Where optical fibre is used, the distinction must be made between multi-mode fibre and single-mode fibre. Multi-mode fibre can be thought of as thicker optical fibre that is cheaper to manufacture but that suffers from less usable bandwidth and greater attenuation.
See also
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References
External links
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- Telecom magazine published since 1922
- at archive.org
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