nature of the Internet, broadband architecture, and optical networking, addressing both wired and wireless alternatives. Communications Fundamentals This page intentionally left blank Chapter Telecommunications Technology Fundamentals This chapter talks about the types of transmission lines and network connections, the electromagnetic spectrum, and what bandwidth is all about in the emerging broadband era. It looks at the differences between analog and digital signals, and it discusses multiplexing. Finally, this chapter describes the various standards bodies and their roles in shaping aspects of telecommunications. Transmission Lines Two prerequisites must be satisfied to have successful communication. The first prerequisite is understandability. The transmitter and receiver must speak the same language. It doesn't matter how big or how clean the pipe between the two end- points. If they're not speaking the same language, they will not be able to under- stand the message. In the case of data communications, we've resolved these issues quite elegantly: We have software and hardware translation devices that can con- vert between the different languages that individual computing systems speak. In the realm of human communications, we're about to embark on that exciting jour- ney as well. Through the use of advanced voice-processing systems, in the next five to seven years we should have the ability to do real-time foreign language transla- tion as part of the network service. And of course, some search engines, such as Google, already provide Web page translation-and do a pretty good job at it. Chapter 1 Telecommunications Technology Fundamentals The second prerequisite is the capability to detect errors as they occur and to have some procedure for resolving those errors. In the case of human communica- tions, intelligent terminals at either end-human beings-can detect noise that may have affected a transmission and request a retransmission, thereby correcting for that error. In the case of data devices, similar lo