mmunications Deregulation Act of 1996 Competition and Deregulation Act of 1996 was a rewrite of the Communications Act of 1934. The stated goal of the act was to promote competition and reduce regulation to secure lower prices and higher quality, more robust, services for American telecommunications consumers by encouraging the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies. telecommuting The process of commuting to work electronically rather than physically. teleconferencing The use of telecommunications links to provide audio or audio/video/graphics capabilities. These systems allow distant workgroups or individuals to meet, and thereby reduce the administrative and opportunity costs of holding in-person meetings involving people from many different cities or countries. telemedicine The practice of using videoconferencing technologies to diagnose illness and provide medical treatment over a distance. Used in rural areas where health care is not readily available and to provide medical services to prisoners, among other applications. Glossary of Terms telephony The convergence of telephone and computer functionality. Specifically, the process of converting voice and other sounds into electrical signals that can be transmitted by wire, radio or fiber; stored and reconverted to audio upon receipt at the distant end. telewriting-based terminal An older term that refers to devices that use digitizing equipment tablets and monitors to enable the sharing of text and graphics in video- and teleconferences. These devices were more evident in the very early 1990s. They used voice-grade circuits or required low data rates for transmission, typically about 9.6 Kbps. They were the predecessor to document conferencing systems. temporal coding Compression that is achieved by comparing successive frames of video over time to eliminate redundancies between them. See tiling. An individual pixel block that becomes visible on the viewer's monitor. Tiles, together, appear as a series of mosaic squares. tiling Video effect 