last decade, video has achieved a role of some signifi- cance in a wide variety of industries. It has found a home in medicine, travel, engineering, and education, and provides not only a medium for the presentation of information, but combined with telecommunica- tions technology it also makes possible such applications as distance learning, video teleconferencing, and desktop video. The ability to digi- tize video signals has brought about a fundamental change in the way video is created, edited, transported, and stored. Its emergence has also changed the players in the game. Once the exclusive domain of filmmakers and television studios, video is now fought over by creative companies and individuals who want to control Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Premises Technologies Premises Technologies its content, cable and telephone companies who want to control its deliv- ery, and a powerful market that wants it to be ubiquitous, richly fea- tured, and cheap. Regulators are in the mix as well, trying to make sense of a telecommunications industry that, once designed to transport voice, now carries a broad mix of fundamentally indistinguishable data types. Summary Premises technologies-including LANs, wireless solutions, and the con- tent that rides on both of them-are the most visible components of the overall network to a customer. In the next chapter we dive into the net- work itself and explore the access technologies that provide the bridge between premises technologies and the transport network. Chapter 5 Questions What are the five principal components of a computer? Describe the functions of each. What factors affect a CPU's processing speed? What does "4.0 MHz" actually mean? What is a bit? A byte? A megabyte? What are the functions of the ALU? Explain the differences between main and secondary memory. Give examples of e