Telecom Dictionary

About Telecom Dictionary

We live in a complex world that increasingly is defined by information technology,by which I do not mean classical data processing but rather the creation,storage,and distribution of all forms of infor-
mation, including audio, text, image, and video. In combination, such information becomes multimedia in nature.Computers of one sort or another are used to capture and create much of that information,which is remarkable in itself, but the value of the data is largely dependent on our ability to share it with others. Robert Metcalfe, who invented the Ethernet local area network in 1973, clearly recognized the value of networking resources.Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users (n
) of the system.(I think Alexander Graham Bell clearly recognized the same relationship roughly 100 years earlier,but he failed to state it in the form of a law,or even a theory.) Information, of course, is our most valuable resource and telecommunications systems and networks allow us to share it with others.
In the 97 years between Bell’s invention of the telephone and Metcalfe’s invention of the LAN, there was a lot of technological progress, and the pace has increased markedly since. Copper wires have given way to glass fibers in the WAN backbone,and fiber optics is now making its way into the local loop.Coaxial cable has been obsoleted in the LAN by twisted pair,glass and plastic optical fiber,and now RF technologies.Wireline technologies have yielded to or are supplemented by wireless in many applications,not only in the LAN,but also in the MAN and WAN.Some estimates now place the number of cellular telephones worldwide at over two billion,which means that there are more cellular telephones than landlines. Since its invention in 1877 and for well over 100 years, circuit switching was the sole method by which telephone calls were connected,but is now rapidly being replaced by packet switching.There seems to be no question that Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies will obsolete the traditional circuitswitched PSTN. Since its origins in the late 1960s as a closed network for academics and intellectuals working on projects for the U.S.military,the Internet has been commercialized and made available to the general public.The Internet now comprises over 60,000 networks connecting nearly 395 million host computers in more than 150 countries.On a daily basis,the Internet handles more than 84 billion e-mail messages and total traffic of approximately 5,175 petabits. It is in large part due to the popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web that so many millions of miles of optical fiber have been deployed and that the available bandwidth has reached such incredible and even indescribable proportions.

All of these and many other relevant technologies build in some way on those that came before and each adds to the vocabulary of telecommunications a set of terminology,along with the seemingly requisite abbreviations,acronyms,contractions,initialisms,and portmanteaux.Many of these have multiple definitions, sensitive to historical or technological context. Broadband, for example, has one set of definitions in a WAN context, but quite another in the LAN domain. Carrier also has several definitions, as do buffer and ATM, and there are at least four kinds of cells. Some acronyms really aren’t acronyms at all — ISO comes to mind.The origin of some terms is fascinating,with bug and ping being good examples.Some definitions in this book are very short, such as plug, whereas some are more like mini-tutorials, such as SONET or frame relay.Some definitions are highly relevant,whereas others are only marginally so,and still others have no relevance to telecom whatsoever,but I find them interesting.Rules of engagement,for example,is a term I find fascinating and I think you will,as well.Also fascinating are the cross-references from rules of engagement to Geneva Convention and warrior’s code.Most terms are cross-referenced,which you will find to be of great value. Some terms are just for fun, so I hope you have a sense of humor.

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