Copy of Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone, at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris
Telecommunication is the technique of transmitting a message, from one point or place to another with the typical additional attribute of being bi-directional. In practice it also recognizes that something may be lost in the process; hence the term ‘telecommunication’ covers all forms of distance communications, including radio, telegraphy, television, telephony, data communication and computer networking.
The elements of a telecommunication system are a transmitter, a medium (line) and possibly a channel imposed upon the medium, and a receiver. The transmitter is a device that transforms or encodes the message into a physical phenomenon; the signal. The transmission medium, by its physical nature, is likely to modify or degrade the signal on its path from the transmitter to the receiver. The receiver has a decoding mechanism capable of recovering the message within certain limits of signal degradation. In some cases, the final “receiver” is the human eye and/or ear (or in some extreme cases other sense organs) and the recovery of the message is done by the brain.
Telecommunication can be point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or broadcasting, which is a particular form of point-to-multipoint that goes only from the transmitter to the receivers.
The art of the telecommunications engineer is to analyse the physical properties of the line or transmission medium, and the statistical properties of the message in order to design the most effective encoding and decoding mechanisms.
When systems are designed to communicate through human sense organs (mainly vision and hearing), physiological and psychological characteristics of human perception will be taken into account. This has important economic implications and engineers will research what defects may be tolerated in the signal yet not affect the viewing or hearing experience too badly.
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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Video: Telecommunications at Mitchell Technical Institute
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