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Telecommunications engineering

Telecommunications engineering, or telecoms engineering, is an engineering discipline centered


on electrical andcomputer engineering which seeks to support and
enhance telecommunication systems. The work ranges from basiccircuit 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, copper wiretelephone facilities, optical fiber cabling, IP data systems, and
terrestrial radio link systems. Telecommunication engineering also overlaps heavily
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 copper wires, 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, and internet 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 part of 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).[3]
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.[4] The international use of the
telegraph has sometimes been dubbed the "Victorian Internet".[5]
The first commercial telephone services were set up in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the
Atlantic in the cities of New Havenand 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.[6][7][8] 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.[9]
In 1880, Bell and co-inventor Charles Sumner Tainter conducted the world's first wireless
telephone call via modulated lightbeams 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).[10] 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 halftoneshades, 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


Corporationbeginning 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 fromCape 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.[13]
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 telSouth America, Africa, Northern Canada, China, Russia and Greenland.
After commercial long ecommunications are rare to nonexistent, for exampleAntarctica, plus
large regions of Australia,
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 transmit problems using teleprinter to his
Complex Number Calculator in New York and receive the computed results back at Dartmouth
College in New Hampshire.[14] 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.[15]
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 as 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 m 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 protocoldata traffic was increasing exponentially, at a faster rate
than integrated circuit complexity had increased under Moore's Law.

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