An abbreviated form of the word telecommunications, Telecom basically refers to the telecommunication companies worldwide. In this age of communication which is the reason telecom industry is vital in the business arena today. Involving the transmission of symbols for the purpose of communication, television, radio and telephone are some of the common devices of telecommunication. The telecommunication systems of companies have transmitters that take information and convert it into signals which are transmitted over a transmission medium. A receiver then receives the information and converts it back into usable information. Signals are either analogue or digital.
A telephone company (also known as a telco or telecommunications operator) is a service provider of telecommunications services such as telephony and data communications access. It is a type of communications service provider that has traditionally provided telephone and similar services. This category includes ILECs, CLECs, and mobile wireless communication companies. In the past, most Telecom Service Providers were government owned and operated in most countries, due to the nature of capital expenditure involved in it. But today there are many private players in most regions of the world, and even most of the government owned companies have been privatized.
Network is the most important concern of telecom companies. They form a part of this network which is a collection of transmitters and receivers that communicate with each other. Digital network consists of one or more routers while analogue networks consisting of one or more switches establishing connection between two or more users. Channels, on the other hand, are a division in a transmission medium that sends multiple sets of information. Modulation involves the shaping of a signal to convey information.
The telephone services provided by telecom companies work on a system where the caller is connected to the other person by switches at various telephone exchanges. A small microphone in the caller’s handset transforms the caller’s voice into an electrical signal. Companies provide fixed line phones which are analogue. Mobile phones are another form of service provided by the companies. They outnumber the fixed line in subscription in many places worldwide. Telephone communication has adopted systems based on optic fibers.
The fixed-line telephones in most residential homes are analog that is, the speaker’s voice directly determines the signal’s voltage. Although short-distance calls may be handled from end-to-end as analog signals, increasingly telephone service providers are transparently converting the signals to digital for transmission before converting them back to analog for reception. The advantage of this is that digitized voice data can travel side-by-side with data from the Internet and can be perfectly reproduced in long distance communication (as opposed to analog signals that are inevitably impacted by noise).
However the bottom line is that Telecom companies are an important part of our society. In 2006, the telecom industry’s revenue was calculated at $1.2 trillion with the major telecom companies of the world including but not limited to AT&T, Bell, Ace Communication, Armstrong Telecom Company and Avaya.
