Telecommunications

Telecommunications is the communication of information over a distance.

Etymology: The term comes from a contraction of the Greek tele, meaning 'far', and communications, meaning "n : the discipline that studies the principles of transmitting information and the methods by which it is delivered (as print or radio or television etc.)"

The term is most commonly used to refer to communication using some type of signaling, such as the aldis lamp or the transmission and reception of electromagnetic energy. This covers many technologies including radio, telegraphy, television, telephone, data communication and computer networking, although other types of signaling are also included.

The basic elements of a simple telecommunications system are:

a.) a transmitter that encodes the information to be communicated into some type of signal

b.) a signal that is transmitted by the transmitter

b.) a transmission medium, which constitutes a communications channel over which the signal is transmitted

c.) a receiver (such as a radio receiver) that receives the signal and decodes the information that was encoded upon it by the transmitter

Note: The transmission medium and the communications channel may also be considered to exist separately - i.e., the communications channel may be considered to consist of some limitation imposed upon the transmission medium, either by the physical nature of the transmission medium with respect to the type of signal energy that will be used to transmit the information over it (for example transmission lines, which have a finite bandwidth, create a 'channel' for electromagnetic energy because of this frequency limitation), or by some process designed explicitly for that purpose (such as multiplexing). However, this distinction is not always made (since virtually any practical transmission medium has some form of physical limitation associated with it), and the transmission medium 'connecting' the transmitter to the receiver is itself considered to be a communications channel (which, of course, may be further subdivided into other 'channels' by multiplexing).

The transmitter is a device that transforms or encodes the message into a physical phenomenon; the signal. The transmission medium, by its physical nature, is likely to modify or degrade the signal on its path from the transmitter to the receiver. The receiver may therefore require a decoding mechanism to recover the message from the received signal. This mechanism can be designed to tolerate a significant degree of signal degradation. Sometimes, the final "receiver" is the human eye, ear (or other sensory organ) and the recovery of the message is done by the brain.

Telecommunication can be point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or broadcasting, which is a particular form of point-to-multipoint that goes only from the transmitter to the receivers.

One of the roles of the telecommunications engineer is to analyze the physical properties of the line or transmission medium, and the statistical properties of the message in order to design the most effective encoding and decoding mechanisms.

When systems are designed to communicate through human sensory organs (mainly those for vision and hearing), physiological and psychological characteristics of human perception must be taken into account. Certain types of defect, while objectively measurable, are not readily apparent to human perception while others are disproportionately apparent. The cost of a system can therefore be reduced by choosing to omit certain information. There is clearly a tradeoff between reduced cost and user demand for higher quality, and this is an important economic consideration for those who plan systems.

The field of telecommunications is no doubt one of the most exciting occupational fields that modern society has to offer. New technology is constantly being developed and finds its applications in the technical systems that make up a telecommunications network. This creates opportunities for developing existing services further, and introducing completely new ones.

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