What is 3G?

3G is an ITU specification for the third generation (analog cellular was the first generation, digital PCS the second) of mobile communications technology. 3G promises increased bandwidth, up to 384 Kbps when a device is stationary or moving at pedestrian speed, 128 Kbps in a car, and 2 Mbps in fixed applications. 3G will work over wireless air interfaces such as GSM, TDMA, and CDMA. The new EDGE air interface has been developed specifically to meet the bandwidth needs of 3G.

The Benefits Of Voice Over IP

Businesses are rapidly to VoIP because there are compelling advantages.

Firstly, and most obviously, there are significant financial savings on running the network itself. One infrastructure carrying both data and voice, provided by one supplier, can be managed, maintained and upgraded much more efficiently than two separate networks for voice and data.

Secondly, and more importantly, while each network has its own value, that value is maximised when the two systems are consolidated. Computer applications and communications technologies can be intelligently linked to streamline the working environment.

Thirdly, VoIP allows organisations to integrate their telephone, fax, e-mail and other applications to capitalise on the benefits of unified messaging. Such a system can eradicate unnecessary interruptions while ensuring individuals always receive information in the most convenient format wherever they are in the world.

Fourthly, the system can be used to support flexible working practices, whereby members of staff work from home or in dispersed, 'virtual' teams. Using the VoIP network, team members can see when their colleagues are logged on to the LAN or using the telephone. VoIP offers improved bandwidth capabilities and makes video-conferencing a viable and cost-effective option for discussions between dispersed team workers.

Fifthly, VoIP technology can contribute to an effective knowledge management strategy. The larger the organisation, the more information that must be shared, so an efficient communications system is particularly important. The VoIP network provides individuals with the opportunity to tap into colleagues' areas of specialism, allowing them to search for experts according to specific criteria.

Sixthly, an organisation can also use VoIP to enhance relationships with its customers. For example, converged call centres, or 'IP contact centres', allow agents to answer all customer enquiry mediums, including telephone, e-mail, fax, web call back, web chat and instant messaging. Customers appreciate the flexibility of interacting with an organisation that can handle feedback from a range of different sources, and are even more inclined to do business with those who can offer an integrated response.

To summarize: VoIP networks provide cheaper means of carrying voice but more importantly provide a much enhanced range of services. As an OECD paper of December 2001 put it: "The potential for IP-based voice as a cheaper alternative to traditional telephony is considered to be less important than the opportunity for the integration of voice in new IP-based applications that are considered drivers for broadband services".

Increasingly, residential consumers too are taking up the option of VoIP services. For them, such services offer:

More choice of voice operators and tariff packages
Cheaper services including possibility of 'free' calls
New services such as conferencing
Innovative services to be announced
A compelling reason to subscribe to broadband

Top 7 Telecommunication Tips

Looked at your phone bill recently?

If you're like me, you'll need to shut off the TV, grab a cup of coffee and a calculator, lock yourself into you room and find a comfortable spot where you will spend the next several hours deciphering the mumbo-jumbo that passes as your phone bill. Back in the "old days" before deregulation, you received your bill broken down into local service, long distance, telephone "lease" fee and taxes. One page. Now? Billing page, tax code/rate code, service provider, monthly local service, other charges, itemized calls, taxes (Federal, Florida Gross Receipts Surcharge, County), messages (4 pages), Long Distance Company Calling Plan Fee, taxes (3 categories), LD calls, calling card calls, Universal Service Fee. Sixteen pages! Add to that some additional pages for any of you who use the "1010---" calling services and you can see why people these days want to pull their hair out over the phone bill.

There's not much you or I can do to change taxes, but here are some useful tips to work with when reviewing your bill:

What are you really being charged per minute for long distance calls? I took a look at my bill one day and even though the rep I had spoken to at the major long distance carrier promoted the "five-cents-a-minute plan," between the five-cent calls, regular calls and monthly service fee, I was paying an average of 8.9 cents per minute.


Don't get slammed! "Slamming" refers to the illegal practice some carriers use to switch your long distance service from your chosen company to theirs without your permission. You can avoid this by calling your local phone company and having a "pic freeze" placed on your line so your local toll and long distance company can't be switched without your verbal or written authorization.


Beware of "rounding." My phone charges were in "round" numbers like 3 minutes, 5 minutes, etc. Use a company that breaks down your bill into 6-second increments. For example, if your call is 2 minutes and 5 seconds, you should not be billed for 3 minutes rounded but for 2 minutes, 6 seconds.


Discounted Bundled Services are a relatively new way of keeping your phone charges down. Find out if your carrier offers discounts for "bundled" local, long distance and Internet services. Also, if you're being charged some kind of monthly "service" or "connection" fee, find out if it can be waived with email billing. The "future" is at hand now so perhaps this is the time to get with it, conserve paper and save some money in the long run.


Watch out for long-term contracts. If you have one, two, even up to 10 lines, there's no reason you need to sign a contract. You should be able to get a month-to-month agreement and not be locked into a company for an extended period.


Negotiate! When I recently switched carriers, I got a call from my former company offering a better deal if I switched back to them. What? I wasn't getting a good deal for the past three years that I had used them? Also, if you have a small or medium-sized business, see if the carrier offers a free audit of your phone bill -- it's worth a shot. Find out what their best deal is. Finally!


Do your homework! No one can do this but you. A small amount of your time now can save quite a bit in the long run, and that's the bottom line!

Modren Communication Fiber optic

The internet, cell phones, fax machines and pagers are a way of life in modern society. All these technologies rely on lasers and fiber optics. The principle behind a laser lies embedded in the heart of quantum mechanics. Einstein built on the theory of quantum mechanics to explain the photoelectric effect in 1905 and showed that electrons could absorb and emit the energy of photons. In 1917, he went on to discover that this emission could be “focused” so that it occurs at a single frequency. This is known as “stimulated emission”. Scientists applied this principle in the mid-1950s to stimulate emission of microwaves using a device called a maser. They then applied the same principle to visible light and used the term laser for this device. However, they could not produce a steady laser light, which was necessary for practical applications
Research on semiconductors led to the development of semiconductor lasers. By the late 1960s, researchers had devised a method to operate lasers continuously at room temperatures using layers of semiconductors. Now they needed to find a method to transmit light across large distances (see Semiconductor Lasers). Although scientists knew that glass fibers could carry light over short distances, it was not a very efficient process. Theoretical work showing that light loss in glass fibers could be decreased dramatically spurred experimental efforts to produce such fibers. Researchers continued exploring techniques to decrease light loss in optical fibers. It then became possible to take fiber-optic communication out of the laboratory and into everyday life. Meanwhile, scientists continued improving laser technology and by the late 1970s, commercial use of fiber-optic systems had begun
As fiber optic cables began to be used world-wide, basic research continued to yield improvements in the systems. Yet more possibilities for improvement in high-speed data lines are available and looming on the horizon

Explore The World of Telecommunication

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 transmiting information and the methods by which it is delivered (as print or radio or television etc.)"

The term is most used to refer to communication using some type of signalling, such as the aldis lamp or the transmission and reception of electromagnetic energy. This covers many media and technologies including radio, fiber optics, telegraphy, television, telephone, data communication and computer networking, although other types of signalling are also included (see Telecommunications History and especially Early Telecommunications).

Explanation
The basic elements of a simple telecommunications system are:

a.) a transmitter that operates upon the information to be communicated in such a way that some type of signal suitable for transmission is produced (this includes any encoding, compression, and error correcting operations, modulation processes if some type of carrier is to be used, or virtually any other operation that is to be performed upon the information in order to prepare it for transmission in the form of a signal)

b.) a signal that is transmitted by the transmitter

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

d.) a receiver (such as a radio receiver) that receives the signal and reverses any and all of the operations that were performed upon the information by the transmitter in order to convert it into the form of a signal (e.g., the receiver decodes, decompresses, compares error correction codes, demodulates the signal to separate it from any carrier that was used, etc. and generally performs these operations in the exact reverse order in which they were performed 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 (see psychoacoustics.)

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 (see simplex).

One of the roles of the telecommunications engineer is to analyse the physical properties of the line or transmission medium, and the statistical properties of the message (see Information theory) 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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Examples of human (tele)communications
In a simplistic example, consider a normal conversation between two people. The message is the sentence that the speaker decides to communicate to the listener. The transmitter consists of the language areas in the brain, the motor cortex, the vocal cords, the larynx, and the mouth that produce those sounds, called speech. The signal consists of the sound waves (pressure fluctuations in air particles) that can be identified as speech when properly decoded. The communications channel consists of the air (transmission medium) carrying those sound waves, and the limitations of the 'channel' include all of the acoustic properties of the surrounding space: echoes, ambient noise, reverberation. Between the speaker and the listener, there might be other devices that do or do not introduce their own distortions of the original vocal signal (for example a telephone, a HAM radio, an IP phone, etc.), although for the sake of the example, each of these would technically be considered to be a separate telecommunication system. The receiver is the listener's ear and auditory system, the auditory nerve, and the language areas in the listener's brain that will "decode" the signal into information and filter out background noise, echos, and any other interference or distortions introduced by the physical properties of the channel.

Another important aspect of the channel is called the bandwidth. A low-bandwidth channel, such as a telephone, cannot carry all of the audio information that is transmitted in normal conversation, causing distortion and irregularities in the speaker's voice, as compared to normal, in-person speech.

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History of Telecommunication
The history of telecommunication predates what is commonly thought of as modern ideas and the systems currently in place today. While the Internet is a major form of telecommunication in today's world its concept is far from new.

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Telegraphy

The first telegraph links in Europe.Main article: Telegraphy
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Optical
The first telegraphs were optical telegraphs, including the use of smoke signals and beacons. These have existed since ancient times. A semaphore network invented by Claude Chappe operated in France from 1792 and remained in operation until 1846. It helped Napoleon enough that it was widely imitated in Europe and the United States. The last (Swedish) commercial semaphore link left operation in 1880.

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Electromagnetic and electrical
The first electromagnetic telegraph was created by Baron Schilling in 1832. The first commercial electrical telegraph was constructed by Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke and entered use on the Great Western Railway. It ran for 13 miles from Paddington station to West Drayton and came into operation on 9 April 1839. It was patented in the United Kingdom in 1837.

An electrical telegraph was independently developed and patented in the United States in 1837 by Samuel Morse. He developed the Morse code signalling alphabet with his assistant, Alfred Vail. The Morse/Vail telegraph was quickly deployed in the following two decades.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was successfully completed on 27 July 1866, allowing transatlantic telegraph communications for the first time. Earlier submarine cable transatlantic cables installed in 1857 and 1858 only operated for a few days or weeks before they failed. The study of underwater telegraph cables accelerated interest in mathematical analysis of these transmission lines.

On 9 August 1892 Thomas Edison received a patent for a two-way telegraph.

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Early wireless communication
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Wireless telegraphy
As far back as Faraday and Hertz in the early 1800s, it was clear to most scientists that wireless communication was possible, and many people worked on developing many devices and improvements. In 1832, James Bowman Lindsay gave a classroom demonstration of wireless telegraphy to his students. By 1854 he was able to demonstrate transmission across the Firth of Tay from Dundee to Woodhaven (now part of Newport-on-Tay), a distance of two miles.

Patents for wireless telegraphy devices started appearing in the 1860s but it was not until 1893 that Nikola Tesla made the first public demonstration of such a system. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail the principles of wireless telegraphy. The apparatus that he used contained all the elements that were incorporated into radio systems before the development of the vacuum tube.

The later derived system (which used several patents of Tesla's) that achieved widespread use was demonstrated by Guglielmo Marconi in 1896. Marconi and Braun shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics for "contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".

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Radio communication
Main article: History of radio
A few decades later, the term radio became more popular. Early radio could not transfer sounds, only Morse code in the tones made by rotary spark gaps. Canadian-American scientist Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was the first to wirelessly transmit a human voice (his own) in 1900.

After the public demonstrations of radio communication that Tesla made in 1893, the principle of radio communication – sending signals through space to receivers – was publicised widely. The Telsa apparatus contained all the elements of radio systems used before the development of the vacuum tube.

On 19 August 1894, British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge demonstrated the reception of Morse code signalling using radio waves using a detecting device called a coherer, a tube filled with iron filings which had been invented by Temistocle Calzecchi-Onesti at Fermo in Italy in 1884.

The first benefit to come from radio telegraphy was the ability to establish communication between coast radio stations and ships at sea. Wireless telegraphy using spark gap transmitters quickly became universal on large ships after the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912. The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea was convened in 1913 and produced a treaty requiring shipboard radio stations be manned 24 hours a day.