Unit4TelecommunicationsRevolution.docVIP

Unit 4: Telecommunications Revolution I. Background Information: telecommunications: Telecommunications, from Greek, means “communications at a distance”. Telecommunications through voice, data, and image communication is changing the world. The ease of accessing information and people anywhere at anytime is having major impacts on society, business, and finance. Two major trends have occurred in the technology that is applicable to telecommunications. The first trend has been the incredible increase in the processing power of digital computers, namely, dramatic decreases in physical size along with equally dramatic increases in complexity, speed, and capacity. The second trend has been the explosive growth in transmission capacity through the widespread use of optical fiber across continents and under oceans. These two trends have had impressive long-term consequences for telecommunications around the world. The Internet and the World Wide Web have already created a global system for the access of information. It has become popular that people check flight, weather, and hotels before traveling to a foreign country. E-mail makes it easy to keep in contact instantly with colleagues and friends around the globe. But many of the peoples of the world do not even have a telephone, much less access to the Internet and the information. The challenge to the telecommunications industry is to bridge the digital gap and extend the availability of telecommunications to all parts of the planet. information age: When we say that we live in the information age, we mean that?we live in a time when information is very important and easy to get. The information age is an era of fundamental and global change in intellectual, philosophical, cultural and social terms. Todays information age began with the telegraph. It was the first instrument to transform information into electrical form and transmit it reliably over long distances. New techniques of encoding and distributing digital i