Questions about Telecommunications
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is telecommunication and how is it defined?
Telecommunication is the transmission of information over a distance using electrical or electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. The International Telecommunication Union defines it as any transmission, emission, or reception of signs, signals, writings, images, and sounds by wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. Slow methods like postal mail and pneumatic tubes are excluded from the definition.
Who coined the word telecommunication?
The term telecommunication was coined in 1904 by the French engineer and novelist Edouard Estaunie, who defined it as the remote transmission of thought through electricity. The word combines the Greek prefix tele, meaning distant, with the Latin verb communicare, meaning to share.
Who invented the telephone and the electrical telegraph?
Alexander Bell filed a patent for the conventional telephone in February 1876, just hours before Elisha Gray filed a caveat for a similar device. The first commercial electrical telegraph was demonstrated on the 25th of July 1837 by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone, with Samuel Morse independently developing his own version the same year.
When did Guglielmo Marconi send the first transatlantic radio message?
On the 17th of December 1902, a transmission from Guglielmo Marconi's station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia became the world's first radio message to cross the Atlantic from North America. Marconi had shown by 1901 that radio waves could be transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean, and he won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics.
How did the Internet begin?
The Internet traces to a four-node network that appeared on the 5th of December 1969, the beginning of the ARPANET. By 1981 the ARPANET had grown to 213 nodes before merging with other networks to form the Internet. The concept of packet switching behind it was investigated in the 1960s by Paul Baran and, independently, Donald Davies.
What is the difference between analogue and digital signals in telecommunication?
Analogue signals vary continuously with respect to the information they carry, while digital signals encode information as a set of discrete values such as ones and zeroes. Digital signals resist noise and stay intact unless noise crosses a certain threshold, but they fail catastrophically when overwhelmed, whereas analogue systems fail gracefully by becoming progressively more degraded yet still usable.
How large is the global telecommunications industry?
The global telecommunications industry was about a 4.7 trillion dollar sector in 2012. Its service revenue was estimated at 1.5 trillion dollars in 2010, corresponding to 2.4 percent of the world's gross domestic product.