The word telecommunication is a
compound of the Greek
prefix tele (τῆλε), meaning distant, far
off, or afar, and the Latin communicare,
meaning to share.
Telecommunication is the
transmission of information by various
types of technologies over wire,
radio, optical, or
other electromagnetic systems. It has
its origin in the desire of humans for
communication over a distance greater
than that feasible with the human voice,
but with a similar scale of expediency;
thus, slow systems (such as postal
mail) are excluded from the field.
Beacons and pigeons
Homing pigeons have occasionally been used throughout history by different cultures. Pigeon post had Persian roots, and was later used by the Romans to aid
their military. In the Middle Ages, chains of beacons were commonly used on hilltops as a means of relaying a signal. Beacon chains suffered the drawback that
they could only pass a single bit of information, so the meaning of the message such as "the enemy has been sighted" had to be agreed upon in advance.
Telegraph and telephone
On 25 July 1837 the first commercial electrical telegraph was demonstrated by English inventor Sir William Fothergill Cooke, and English scientist Sir Charles
Wheatstone. In 1837 Samuel Morse independently developed a version of the electrical telegraph. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was successfully
completed on 27 July 1866, allowing transatlantic telecommunication for the first time.
Radio and television
Starting in 1894, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi began developing a wireless communication using the then newly discovered phenomenon of radio waves,
showing by 1901 that they could be transmitted across the Atlantic Ocean. Millimetre wave communication was first investigated by Bengali physicist Jagadish
Chandra Bose during 1894–1896, when he reached an extremely high frequency of up to 60 GHz in his experiments. World War I accelerated the development of
radio for military communications. After the war, commercial radio AM broadcasting began in the 1920s and became an important mass medium for entertainment
and news. World War II again accelerated the development of radio for the wartime purposes of aircraft and land communication, radio navigation and radar.
The type of device known as a thermionic tube or thermionic valve uses the phenomenon of thermionic emission of electrons from
a heated cathode and is used for a number of fundamental electronic functions such as signal amplification and
current rectification. The simplest vacuum tube, the diode invented in 1904 by John Ambrose Fleming, contains only a heated
electron-emitting cathode and an anode. Electrons can only flow in one direction through the device—from the cathode to the
The development of transistor technology has been fundamental to modern electronic telecommunication. The first transistor,
a point-contact transistor, was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain at Bell Labs in 1947. Along with computers,
other essential elements of modern telecommunication that are built include mobile devices, transceivers, base
station modules, routers, RF power amplifiers, microprocessors, memory chips, and telecommunication circuits.
Computer networks and the Internet
On 11 September 1940, George Stibitz transmitted problems for his Complex Number Calculator in New York using a teletype.
This configuration of a centralized computer (mainframe) with remote dumb terminals remained popular well into the 1970s.
The wireless revolution began in the 1990s, with the advent of digital wireless networks leading to a social revolution, and a
paradigm shift from wired to wireless technology. Practical digital media distribution and streaming were made possible by
advances in data compression, due to the impractically high memory, storage and bandwidth requirements of uncompressed
media. The effective capacity to exchange information worldwide through two-way telecommunication networks grew from
281 petabytes (pB) of optimally compressed information in 1986, to 471 pB in 1993, to 2.2 exabytes (eB) in 2000, and to 65 eB in
A transmitter that takes information and converts it to a signal.
A transmission medium, also called the physical channel that carries the signal. An example of this is the "free space
A receiver that takes the signal from the channel and converts it back into usable information for the recipient.
For example, in a radio broadcasting station the station's large power amplifier is the transmitter; and the broadcasting antenna is
the interface between the power amplifier and the "free space channel". The free space channel is the transmission medium; and
the receiver's antenna is the interface between the free space channel and the receiver. Next, the radio receiver is the destination
of the radio signal, and this is where it is converted from electricity to sound for people to listen to.
The term "channel" has two different meanings. In one meaning, a channel is the
physical medium that carries a signal between the transmitter and the receiver.
Examples of this include the atmosphere for sound communications, glass optical
fibers for some kinds of optical communications, coaxial cables for
communications by way of the voltages and electric currents in them, and free
space for communications using visible light, infrared waves, ultraviolet light,
and radio waves. Coaxial cable types are classified by RG type or "radio guide“.
The other meaning of the term "channel" in telecommunications is seen in the
phrase communications channel, which is a subdivision of a transmission medium
so that it can be used to send multiple streams of information simultaneously.
A telecommunications network is a
collection of transmitters, receivers,
and communications channels that send
messages to one another. Some digital
communications networks contain one or
more routers that work together to transmit
information to the correct user. An analog
communications network consists of one or
more switches that establish a connection
between two or more users.
For both types of networks, repeaters may be necessary to amplify or recreate the signal when it is
being transmitted over long distances. This is to combat attenuation that can render the signal
indistinguishable from the noise. Another advantage of digital systems over analog is that their
output is easier to store in memory, i.e. two voltage states (high and low) are easier to store than a
continuous range of states.
Nowadays, it seems that everyone has a computer and is discovering that
communication technologies are necessary. E-mail, Internet, and file
transferring has become a part of the modern world. Networks allow people to
connect their computers together and to share resources. They allow people
to communicate and interact with each other.