Telecommunications
CONTENT
1. INTRODUCTION
2. DEVELOPING OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS
3. SATTELITE SERVICES
4. INTERNET
5. ADVANCING ROLE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN BANKING
6. RUSSIA’S TELECOMMUNICATIONS ROADS GET WIDER, MORE EXPENSIVE
7. FUTURE OF DEVELOPMENT
8. CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
No one can deny the role of telecommunications for society.
Currently hundreds of millions of people use wireless communication means.
Cell phone is no longer a symbol of prestige but a tool, which lets to use
working time more effectively. Considering that the main service of a
mobile connection operator is providing high quality connection, much
attention in the telecommunication market is paid to the spectrum of
services that cell network subscriber may receive.
DEVELOPING OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS
Late in the nineteenth century communications facilities were augmented
by a new invention – telephone. In the USA its use slowly expanded, and by
1900 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company controlled 855,000
telephones; but elsewhere the telephone made little headway until the
twentieth century. After 1900, however, telephone installations extended
much more rapidly in all the wealthier countries. The number of telephones
in use in the world grew at almost 100 per cent per decade. But long-
distance telephone services gradually developed and began to compete with
telegraphic business. A greater contribution to long-range communication
came with the development of wireless. Before the outbreak of the First
World War wireless telegraphy was established as a means of regular
communication with ships at sea, and provided a valuable supplement to
existing telegraph lines and cables. In the next few years the telephone
systems of all the chief countries were connected with each other by radio.
Far more immediate was the influence that radio had through broadcasting
and by television, which followed it at an interval of about twenty-five
years.
Telephones are as much a form of infrastructure as roads or
electricity, and competition will make them cheaper. Losses from lower
prices will be countered by higher usage, and tax revenues will benefit
from the faster economic growth that telephones bring about. Most important
of all, by cutting out the need to install costly cables and microwave
transmitters, the new telephones could be a boon to the remote and poor
regions of the earth. Even today, half the world’s population lives more
than two hours away from a telephone, and that is one reason why they find
it hard to break out of their poverty. A farmer’s call for advice could
save a whole crop; access to a handset could help a small rural business
sell its wares. And in rich places with reasonable telephone systems
already in place, the effect of new entrants – the replacement of bad,
overpriced services with clever, cheaper ones – is less dramatic but still
considerable.
Global phones are not going to deliver all these benefits at once, or
easily. Indeed, if the market fails to develop, it could prove too small to
support the costs of launching satellites. Still, that is a risk worth
taking. And these new global telephones reflect a wider trend. Lots of
other new communication services – on-line film libraries, personal
computers that can send video-clips and sound-bites as easily as they can
be used for writing letters, terrestrial mobile-telephone systems cheap
enough to replace hard-wired family sets – are already technically
possible. What they all need is deregulation. Then any of them could bring
about changes just as unexpected and just as magical as anything that
Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone has already achieved.
SATTELITE SIRVICES
Our world has become an increasingly complex place in which, as
individuals, we are very dependent on other people and on organizations. An
event in some distant part of the globe can rapidly and significantly
affect the quality of life in our home country.
This increasing independence, on both a national and international
scale, has led us to create systems that can respond immediately to
dangers, enabling appropriate defensive or offensive actions to be taken.
These systems are operating all around us in military, civil, commercial
and industrial fields.
A worldwide system of satellites has been created, and it is possible
to transmit signals around the globe by bouncing them from on satellite to
an earth station and thence to another satellite.
Originally designed to carry voice traffic, they are able to carry
hundreds of thousands of separate simultaneous calls. These systems are
being increasingly adopted to provide for business communications,
including the transmission of traffic for voice, facsimile, data and
vision.
It is probable that future satellite services will enable a great
variety of information services to transmit directly into the home,
possibly including personalized electronic mail. The electronic computer is
at the heart of many such systems, but the role of telecommunications is
not less important. There will be a further convergence between the
technologies of computing and telecommunications. The change will be
dramatic: the database culture, the cashless society, the office at home,
the gigabit-per-second data network.
We cannot doubt that the economic and social impact of these concepts
will be very significant. Already, advanced systems of communication are
affecting both the layman and the technician . Complex functions are being
performed by people using advanced terminals which are intended to be as
easy to use as the conventional telephone.
The new global satellite-communications systems will offer three kinds
of service, which may overlap in many different kinds of receivers:
Voice. Satellite telephones will be able to make calls from anywhere on
earth to anywhere else. That could make them especially useful to remote,
third-world villages (some of which already use stationary satellite
telephones), explorers and disaster-relief teams. Today’s mobile phones
depend on earth-bound transmitters, whose technical standards vary from
country to country. So business travelers cannot use their mobile phones on
international trips. Satellite telephones would make that possible.
Massaging. Satellite messagers have the same global coverage as
satellite telephones, but carry text alone, which could be useful for those
with laptop computers. Equipped with a small screen like today’s pagers,
satellite messagers will also receive short messages.
Tracking. Voice and messaging systems will also tell their users where
they are to within a few hundred metres. Combined with the messaging
service, the location service could help rescue teams to find stranded
adventurers, the police to find stolen cars, exporters to follow the
progress of cargoes, and haulage companies to check that drivers are not
detouring to the pub. Satellite systems will provide better positioning
information to anyone who has a receiver for their signals.
INTERNET
The internet, a global computer network which embraces millions of
users all over the world, began in the United States in 1969 as a military
experiment. It was designed to survive a nuclear war. Information sent over
the Internet takes the shortest path available from one computer to
another. Because of this, any two computers on the Internet will be able to
stay in touch with each other as long as there is a single route between
them. This technology is called packet swithing. Owing to this technology,
if some computers on the network are knocked out (by a nuclear explosion,
for example), information will just rout around them. One such packet-
swithing network which has already survived a war is the Iraqi computer
network which was not knocked out during the Gulf War.
Most of the Internet host computers (more than 50%) are in the United
States, while the rest are located in more than 100 other countries.
Although the number of host computers can be counted fairly accurately,
nobody knows exactly how many people use the Internet, there are millions
worldwide, and their number is growing by thousands each month.
The most popular Internet service is e-mail. Most of the people, who
have access to the Internet, use the network only for sending and receiving
e-mail messages. However, other popular services are available on the
Internet: reading USENET News, using the World-Wide-Web, telnet, FTP, and
Gopher.
In many developing countries the Internet may provide businessmen with
a reliable alternative to the expensive and unreliable telecommunications
systems of these countries. Commercial users can communicate cheaply over
the Internet with the rest of the world. When they send e-mail messages,
they only have to pay for phone calls to their local service providers, not
for calls across their countries or around the world. But who actually pays
for sending e-mail messages over the Internet long distances, around the
world? The answer is very simple: users pay their service provider a
monthly or hourly fee. Part of this fee goes toward its costs to connect to
a larger service provider, and part of the fee received by the larger
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