Telecommunications engineering

Telecommunications Engineering is a subfield of electrical engineering which seeks to design and

devise systems of communication at a distance. The work ranges from basic circuit design to
strategic mass developments. A telecommunication engineer is responsible for designing and
overseeing the installation of telecommunications equipment and facilities, such as complex
electronic switching systems, and other plain old telephone service facilities, optical fiber cabling,
IP networks, and microwave transmission systems. Telecommunications engineering also overlaps
with broadcast engineering. Telecommunication is a diverse field of engineering connected to
electronic, civil and systems engineering. Ultimately, telecom engineers are responsible for
providing high-speed data transmission services. They use a variety of equipment and transport
media to design the telecom network infrastructure; the most common media used by wired
telecommunications today are twisted pair, coaxial cables, and optical fibers. Telecommunications
engineers also provide solutions revolving around wireless modes of communication and
information transfer, such as wireless telephony services, radio and satellite communications,
internet, Wi-Fi and broadband technologies.
Telecommunication systems are generally designed by telecommunication engineers which
sprang from technological improvements in the telegraph industry in the late 19th century and
the radio and the telephone industries in the early 20th century. Today, telecommunication is
widespread and devices that assist the process, such as the television, radio and telephone, are
common in many parts of the world. There are also many networks that connect these devices,
including computer networks, public switched telephone network (PSTN), radio networks, and
television networks. Computer communication across the Internet is one of many examples of
telecommunication. Telecommunication plays a vital role in the world economy, and the
telecommunication industry's revenue has been placed at just under 3% of the gross world
product.
Telegraph and telephone
Samuel Morse independently developed a version of the electrical telegraph that he
unsuccessfully demonstrated on 2 September 1837. Soon after he was joined by Alfred Vail who
developed the register — a telegraph terminal that integrated a logging device for recording
messages to paper tape. This was demonstrated successfully over three miles (five kilometres)
on 6 January 1838 and eventually over forty miles (sixty-four kilometres) between Washington,
D.C. and Baltimore on 24 May 1844. The patented invention proved lucrative and by 1851
telegraph lines in the United States spanned over 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometres). The first
successful transatlantic telegraph cable was completed on 27 July 1866, allowing transatlantic
telecommunication for the first time. Earlier transatlantic cables installed in 1857 and 1858 only
operated for a few days or weeks before they failed. The international use of the telegraph has
sometimes been dubbed the "Victorian Internet". The first commercial telephone services were set
up in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of New Haven and London.
Alexander Graham Bell held the master patent for the telephone that was needed for such services
in both countries. The technology grew quickly from this point, with inter-city lines being built
and telephone exchanges in every major city of the United States by the mid-1880s. Despite this,
transatlantic voice communication remained impossible for customers until January 7, 1927, when
a connection was established using radio. However no cable connection existed until TAT-1 was
inaugurated on September 25, 1956, providing 36 telephone circuits.
In 1880, Bell and co-inventor Charles Sumner Tainter conducted the world's first wireless
telephone call via modulated light beams projected by photophones. The scientific principles of
their invention would not be utilized for several decades, when they were first deployed in
military and fiber-optic communications.
Radio and television
Over several years starting in 1894 the Italian inventor
Guglielmo Marconi built the first complete, commercially successful wireless telegraphy system
based on airborne electromagnetic waves (radio transmission). In December 1901, he would go on
to established wireless communication between Britain and Newfoundland, earning him the Nobel
Prize in physics in 1909 (which he shared with Karl Braun).[11] In 1900 Reginald Fessenden
was able to wirelessly transmit a human voice. On March 25, 1925, Scottish inventor John Logie
Baird publicly demonstrated the transmission of moving silhouette pictures at the London
department store Selfridges. In October 1925, Baird was successful in obtaining moving pictures
with halftone shades, which were by most accounts the first true television pictures.[12] This led
to a public demonstration of the improved device on 26 January 1926 again at Selfridges. Baird's
first devices relied upon the Nipkow disk and thus became known as the mechanical television. It
formed the basis of semi-experimental broadcasts done by the British Broadcasting Corporation
beginning September 30, 1929.
Satellite
The first U.S. satellite to relay communications was Project SCORE in 1958, which used a tape
recorder to store and forward voice messages. It was used to send a Christmas greeting to the world
from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1960 NASA launched an Echo satellite; the
100-foot (30 m) aluminized PET film balloon served as a passive reflector for radio
communications. Courier 1B, built by Philco, also launched in 1960, was the world's first active
repeater satellite. Satellites these days are used for many applications such as uses in GPS,
television, internet and telephone uses. Telstar was the first active, direct relay commercial
communications satellite. Belonging to AT&T as part of a multi-national agreement between
AT&T, Bell Telephone Laboratories, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French
National PTT (Post Office) to develop satellite communications, it was launched by NASA from
Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, the first privately sponsored space launch. Relay 1 was launched
on December 13, 1962, and became the first satellite to broadcast across the Pacific on November
22, 1963. The first and historically most important application for communication satellites was in
intercontinental long distance telephony. The fixed Public Switched Telephone Network relays
telephone calls from land line telephones to an earth station, where they are then transmitted a
receiving satellite dish via a geostationary satellite in Earth orbit. Improvements in submarine
communications cables, through the use of fiber-optics, caused some decline in the use of
satellites for fixed telephony in the late 20th century, but they still exclusively service remote
islands such as Ascension Island, Saint Helena, Diego Garcia, and Easter Island, where no
submarine cables are in service. There are also some continents and some regions of countries
where landline telecommunications are rare to nonexistent, for example Antarctica, plus large
regions of Australia, South America, Africa, Northern Canada, China, Russia and Greenland.
After commercial long distance telephone service was established via communication satellites,
a host of other commercial telecommunications were also adapted to similar satellites starting
in 1979, including mobile satellite phones, satellite radio, satellite television and satellite
Internet access. The earliest adaption for most such services occurred in the 1990s as the pricing
for commercial satellite transponder channels continued to drop significantly.
Computer networks and the Internet
On 11 September 1940, George Stibitz was able to transmitproblems using teleprinter to his
Complex Number Calculator in New York and receive the computed results
back at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. This configuration of a centralized computer or
mainframe computer with remote "dumb terminals" remained popular
throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. However, it was not until the 1960s that researchers
started to investigate packet switching — a technology that allows chunks of data
to be sent between different computers without first passing through a centralized mainframe. A
four-node network emerged on 5 December 1969. This network soon became the ARPANET,
which by 1981 would consist of 213 nodes. ARPANET's development centered around the
Request for Comment process and on 7 April 1969, RFC 1 was published. This process is
important because ARPANET would eventually merge with other networks to form the Internet,
and many of the communication protocols that the Internet relies upon today were specified
through the Request for Comment process. In September 1981, RFC 791 introduced the Internet
Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and RFC 793 introduced the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) thus
creating the TCP/IP protocol that much of the Internet relies upon today.
Optical fiber
Optical fiber can be used as a medium for telecommunication and computer networking because
it is flexible and can be bundled into cables. It is especially advantageous for long-distance
communications, because light propagates through the fiber with little attenuation
compared to electrical cables. This allows long distances to be spanned with few repeaters. In 1966
Charles K. Kao and George Hockham proposed optical fibers at STC Laboratories (STL) at
Harlow, England, when they showed that the losses of 1000 dB/km in existing
glass (compared to 5-10 dB/km in coaxial cable) was due to contaminants, which could potentially
be removed. Optical fiber was successfully developed in 1970 by Corning Glass Works, with
attenuation low enough for communication purposes (about 20dB/km), and at the same time GaAs
(Gallium arsenide) semiconductor lasers were developed that were compact and therefore suitable
for transmitting light through fiber optic cables for long distances. After a period of research
starting from 1975, the first commercial fiber-optic communications system was developed, which
operated at a wavelength around 0.8 μm and used GaAs semiconductor lasers. This first-generation
system operated at a bit rate of 45 Mbps with repeater spacing of up to 10 km. Soon on 22 April
1977, General Telephone and Electronics sent the first live telephone traffic through fiber optics
at a 6 Mbit/s throughput in Long Beach, California. The first wide area network fibre optic cable
system in the world seems to have been installed by Rediffusion in Hastings, East Sussex, UK in
1978. The cables were placed in ducting throughout the town, and had over 1000 subscribers. They
were used at that time for the transmission of television channels, not available because of local
reception problems. The first transatlantic telephone cable to use optical fiber was TAT-8, based
on Desurvire optimized laser amplification technology. It went into operation in 1988.
In the late 1990s through 2000, industry promoters, and research companies such as KMI, and
RHK predicted massive increases in demand for communications bandwidth due to increased
use of the Internet, and commercialization of various bandwidth-intensive consumer services,
such as video on demand. Internet Protocol data traffic was increasing exponentially, at a faster
rate than integrated circuit complexity had increased under Moore's Law.
Basic elements of a telecommunication system
Transmitter
Transmitter (information source) that takes information and converts it to a signal for transmission.
In electronics and telecommunications a transmitter or radio transmitter is an
electronic device which, with the aid of an antenna, produces radio waves. In addition to their use
in broadcasting, transmitters are necessary component parts of many electronic devices that
communicate by radio, such as cell phones.
Transmission medium
Transmission medium over which the signal is transmitted. For example, the transmission medium
for sounds is usually air, but solids and liquids may also act as transmission media for sound. Many
transmission media are used as communications channel. One of the most common physical media
used in networking is copper wire. Copper wire is used to carry signals to long
distances using relatively low amounts of power. Another example of a physical medium is optical
fiber, which has emerged as the most commonly used transmission medium for long-distance
communications. Optical fiber is a thin strand of glass that guides light along its length. The
absence of a material medium in vacuum may also constitute a transmission medium for
electromagnetic waves such as light and radio waves.
Receiver
Receiver (information sink) that receives and converts the signal back into required information.
In radio communications, a radio receiver is an electronic device that receives radio waves and
converts the information carried by them to a usable form. It is used with an antenna. The
information produced by the receiver may be in the form of sound (an audio signal), images (a
video signal) or digital data.
Wired communication
Wired communications make use of underground communications cables (less often, overhead
lines), electronic signal amplifiers (repeaters) inserted into connecting cables at specified points,
and terminal apparatus of various types, depending on the type of wired communications used.
Wireless communication
Wireless communication involves the transmission of information over a distance without help of
wires, cables or any other forms of electrical conductors. Wireless operations permit services, such
as long-range communications, that are impossible or impractical to implement with the use of
wires. The term is commonly used in the telecommunications industry to refer to
telecommunications systems (e.g. radio transmitters and receivers, remote controls etc.) which use
some form of energy (e.g. radio waves, acoustic energy, etc.) to transfer information without the
use of wires. Information is transferred in this manner over both short and long distances.