Portal:Telecommunication
The Telecommunication Portal
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Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information with an immediacy comparable to face-to-face communication. As such, slow communications technologies like postal mail and pneumatic tubes are excluded from the definition. Many transmission media have been used for telecommunications throughout history, from smoke signals, beacons, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs to wires and empty space made to carry electromagnetic signals. These paths of transmission may be divided into communication channels for multiplexing, allowing for a single medium to transmit several concurrent communication sessions. Several methods of long-distance communication before the modern era used sounds like coded drumbeats, the blowing of horns, and whistles. Long-distance technologies invented during the 20th and 21st centuries generally use electric power, and include the telegraph, telephone, television, and radio.
Early telecommunication networks used metal wires as the medium for transmitting signals. These networks were used for telegraphy and telephony for many decades. In the first decade of the 20th century, a revolution in wireless communication began with breakthroughs including those made in radio communications by Guglielmo Marconi, who won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. Other early pioneers in electrical and electronic telecommunications include co-inventors of the telegraph Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse, numerous inventors and developers of the telephone including Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell, inventors of radio Edwin Armstrong and Lee de Forest, as well as inventors of television like Vladimir K. Zworykin, John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth.
Since the 1960s, the proliferation of digital technologies has meant that voice communications have gradually been supplemented by data. The physical limitations of metallic media prompted the development of optical fibre. The Internet, a technology independent of any given medium, has provided global access to services for individual users and further reduced location and time limitations on communications. (Full article...)
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Streaming media refers to multimedia for playback using an offline or online media player that is delivered through a network. Media is transferred in a "stream" of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains an entire media file before consuming the content. Streaming is presently most prevalent in video-on-demand, streaming television, and music streaming services over the Internet.
While streaming is most commonly associated with multimedia from a remote server over the Internet, it also includes offline multimedia between devices on a local area network, for example using DLNA and a home server, or in a personal area network between two devices using Bluetooth (which uses radio waves rather than IP). Online streaming was initially popularised by RealNetworks and Microsoft in the 1990s and has since grown to become the globally most popular method for consuming music and video, with numerous competing subscription services being offered since the 2010s. Audio streaming to wireless speakers, often using Bluetooth, is another use that has become prevalent during that decade. Live streaming is the real-time delivery of content during production, much as live television broadcasts content via television channels. (Full article...)General images
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- ... that an apparently jobless man wearing a cardboard box who taped himself to a lamppost was actually a new DJ for a Vermont radio station?
- ... that Colin Mackay, the political editor at Scottish Television, was "very sad" when Colin MacKay, the political editor at Scottish Television, died?
- ... that a Phoenix radio station served as the springboard for future Arizona governor Jack Williams and comedian Steve Allen?
- ... that in its final years, Mississippi radio station WKXG allegedly attempted to maintain its broadcast license by "taking turns" with another station in their transmitter facility?
- ... that a Washington state radio station turned to "professional bikini watchers"—military recruiters—to report on crowds at local beaches?
- ... that Liu Yunbin, the son of the second president of the People's Republic of China, was a graduate in radiochemistry and contributed to the development of China's first atomic bomb?
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