Telecom Crash Course

Telecom Crash Course

Telecommunications, like all highly visible and interesting fields, is full

of apocryphal stories, technical myths, and fascinating legends. Everyone

in the field seems to know someone who knows the outside-plant repairperson who found the poisonous snake in the equipment box in the manhole,1 or the person who was on the cable-laying ship when it pulled up

the cable that had been bitten through by some species of deep water

shark, or a collection of seriously evil hackers, or the backhoe driver who

cut the cable that put Los Angeles off the air for 12 hours.

There is also a collection of technojargon that pervades the telecommunications industry and often gets in the way of the relatively straightforward task of learning how all this stuff actually works. To ensure that

such things don’t get in the way of absorbing what’s in this book, I’d like

to begin with a discussion of some of them. I am a writer, after all; words

are important to me.

This is a book about telecommunications, which is the science of communicating over distance (“tele-”, from the Greek te

–le, meaning “far off”).

It is, however, fundamentally dependent upon data communications, the

science of moving traffic between computing devices so that this traffic

can be manipulated in some way to make it useful. Data, in and of itself,

is not particularly useful, consisting as it does of a stream of ones and

zeroes that is meaningful only to the computing device that will receive

and manipulate those ones and zeroes. The data does not really become

useful until it is converted by some application into information, because

a human can generally understand information. The human then acts

upon the information using a series of intuitive processes that further

convert the information into knowledge; at this point it becomes truly

useful. Here’s an example: A computer generates a steady stream of ones

and zeroes in response to a series of business activities involving the

computer that generates the ones and zeroes. Those ones and zeroes are

fed into another computer, where an application converts them into a

spreadsheet of sales figures (information) for the store from which they

originated. A financial analyst studies the spreadsheet, calculates a few

ratios, examines some historical data (including not only sales numbers

but demographics, weather patterns, and political trends), and makes an

informed prediction about future stocking requirements and advertising

focal points for the store based on the knowledge that the analyst was

able to create from the distilled information. That’s knowledge. To take it

one step further, once decisions have been made and the results of those