Telecommunication

We are behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution,”

Telecommunication is the transmission of information.

Telecommunications has been an important part of our culture since the invention of the telegraph in the 1800s. It started as a form of long distance communication. The telegraph provided a way to send messages to people far away, that was faster than sending mail. Over the course of the last century, telecommunications has taken on a whole new purpose and plays a much bigger role in our everyday lives.

In modern times, telecommunications involves the use of electrical devices such as the telegraph, telephone, and teleprompter, as well as the use of radio and microwave communications, as well as fiber optics and their associated electronics, plus the use of the orbiting satellites and the Internet.
A revolution in wireless telecommunications began in the 1900s (decade) with pioneering developments in wireless radio communications by Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909 for his efforts. Other highly notable pioneering inventors and developers in the field of electrical and electronic telecommunications include Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse (telegraph), Alexander Graham Bell (telephone), Edwin Armstrong, and Lee de Forest (radio), as well as John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth (television).

Telecommunication systems work by transferring signals from different nodes until they reach their destinations.

History

Ancient systems

Greek hydraulic semaphore systems were used as early as the 4th century BC. The hydraulic semaphores, which worked with water filled vessels and visual signals, functioned as optical telegraphs. However, they could only utilize a very limited range of pre-determined messages, and as with all such optical telegraphs could only be deployed during good visibility conditions.

Systems since the Middle

In 1792, Claude Chappe, a French engineer, built the first fixed visual telegraphy system (or semaphore line) between Lille and Paris. However semaphore systems suffered from the need for skilled operators and the expensive towers at intervals of 10–30 kilometers (6–20 mi). As a result of competition from the electrical telegraph,

Types of Telecommunication Mediums

 

Radio

According to WCBN, Guglielmo Marconi built his first radio equipment in 1894, and established the world's first radio link in 1899 between England and France. Radio was the first form of telecommunication that served multiple purposes. It provided radio plays and music for entertainment, and newscasts with up-to-date news and information from around the world.

Telephone

        

 telephone-past                                      present

Since the invention of the telephone, devices have dramatically evolved from relatively primitive tools of communication to state-of-the-art mobile multi-communications sources. Gardiner Hubbard formed the first telephone company, the Bell Telephone Company, in 1877. Today the telephone as evolved into the cell phone and is a one-stop hub for all of our communication needs. Cell phones allow you to connect with people on the phone while you stay on the go.

Television

            

 television-past                                          present

According to The History of Television, a German man named Paul Gottlieb Nipkow developed one of the earliest forms of television. As it continued to evolve, there were two different versions being developed: a mechanical version and an electrical version. The mechanical version would eventually be phased out by the electrical. The electrical version was perfected by a 21-year-old inventor named Philo T. Farnsworth in 1927. Over the years, television has become a giant media empire. Today Television has become such an integral part in every human’s life. Television has totally changed our world.

Internet

The most modern means of communication in today’s world. In 1966, a man named Lawrence G. Roberts began developing the idea for an interconnected computer network. According to the Internet Society, it was in October of 1995 that the Federal Networking Council passed a resolution that defined the Internet as "a global information system that is logically linked together by a globally unique address based on the Internet Protocol." The Internet provides you with the opportunity to fulfill all of your communication needs. You can visit sites and listen to the radio, watch your favorite television shows and movies chat with people in a live video chat and stay connected with relatives via email. With the Internet, people in the world are more connected than ever.  Internet is a boon to man if used in a proper way.

Types of Telecommunications used today

There are two primary types of telecommunication networks used today. A LAN, local area network, which is privately owned and which is used for short distances. A LAN is usually used on college campuses or in business settings. The other type is a WAN, wide area network. WANS generally connect many different LANs and cover a very large area. Telecommunication networks can be owned, shared or leased from other companies. It is very expensive for one entity to supply all of the necessary mediums, such as fiber optics; therefore many networks share or lease lines with each other.

Components of Telecommunication

Components are the most essential parts of any communication systems. A telecommunication system has three main components. The first component is a transmitter which is used to send information. The information is sent in the form of electrical signals through some type of medium which makes up the second vital component. The third component is the receiver. This component receives the transmitted data and converts it into a form that is readable and understood. Computers, fiber optics and telecommunication's software consist of these components.

Digital technology

Telecommunications is being increasingly dominated by digital technology. A digital transmission carries information in the form of discrete packages of ones and zeros. A computer of some sort will then convert this kind of signal into complex digital information. Previous telecommunications technology, such as the radio, used a continuous analog signal that conveyed information by variations, such as its strength. This type of communication was more subject to distortion and noise interference from other sources.

Telecom Software

As the world of telecom is fast moving from proprietary systems to open standard based systems, a lot of intelligence of networks has shifted to software. The phrase "telecom software", that till very recently, meant applications run by telecom service providers on their computing platforms. Telecom software today broadly means anything from embedded software to content.

Broadly, the telecom software can be classified into three areas, not always mutually exclusive. They are—embedded software, system software, and application software that is used by service providers.
One can classify the nature of development of telecom software work into four categories—development of software for technology systems; the service provider onsite practices including development and integration; product development and services centered around products. But among the four categories the emerging areas seem to be service management, software broadband aggregation platforms.
Almost non-existent a couple of years back, a new breed of telecom software product companies are now targeting the emerging application areas like IP QoS, broadband aggregation, wireless-IP integration, etc.
Telecom towers radiation

With growing concerns over the impact of mobile radiation on human health, telecom towers have to reduce electromagnetic radiation.

Dangers of cell towers have been well-documented over the last decade. Cell tower radiation is indeed hazardous, and more and more people are concerned about it.

Although the telecom industry and federal governments maintain there’s no conclusive evidence of health risks of cell tower radiation, literally dozens of studies world-wide consistently warn us about the dangers.

What will it take to Alert People to the Dangers of Cell Towers?

With so much evidence about cell tower radiation health risks, how is it that governments allow cell phone companies to continue to erect more and more cell towers and antennas? One factor, of course, is that although ever-growing numbers of people are voicing concerns about possible health risks of cells towers, most people want good reception on their phones, wherever they happen to be. And competing cell phone companies are very accommodating; they strive to put up as many cell towers and antennas as they can to keep their far-roaming customers satisfied

 Approaches to Minimize the Risks of Radiation

There are several approaches you can take to minimize the risks of living near cell towers:

1. Avoid or minimize your exposure. If you find your home is surrounded by cell towers and moving isn’t an option, you can find some help from specially-formulated EMF protection paint, shielding fabric or shielding glass or tinting for windows.

2. Use EMF protection devices, such as pendants, chips or other protective devices. Good products will ground you into the earth’s electro-magnetic field to strengthen your biofield. This helps to restore cellular function and strengthen your immune system.

3. Reverse the damage that EMFs have already done. Do this through nutritional support, such as with anti-oxidant supplementation, which can counteract the effects of free radicals caused by EMF exposure.

4. The minimum distance of a tower (with two antennas) should be 35 meter from a residential building.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of telecommunication?

Advantages:
Quick and accessible communication
Lack of travel time
Saves time
Saves gasoline (do not have to drive distance)
More than two people can communicate to one another at the same time
Next "best thing" to being there
Easy to exchange ideas and information via phone and/or fax
World Wide access
Disadvantages:
Remote areas do not have access
Remote areas may not be able to afford necessary equipment
Cannot see whom you are speaking with
Cannot see facial expressions, therefore leads to misunderstandings
Cultural barriers
Poor connections or downed power lines during/after storms

Hazardous effects on public health by telecom towers

Communication in the Future

Communication has grown significantly over the past decades. The world was once unable to carry on conversation using voice telephones. Just as people once rode horses instead of driving vehicles, communications have improved drastically over the years.  

The inceptions of the cellular telephone, wireless internet and other technologies have given people the ability to contact and communicate with others from virtually anywhere in the world and at any time

Communication is a major topic in society. With the many steps that have been taken to bring the world the communication devices of today, it stands to reason that as more and more researchers and scientists work to develop newer devices, the technology of the future could be quite substantial.
Conclusion

Telecommunications have changed the world. The increasing globalization that has spread to almost all parts of daily life is very much a result of the improvement in telecommunications technology. Understanding the basics of telecommunication will help you to better understand the way that the modern world is being changed every day by this technology. People around the world have been brought closer to each other through telecommunications as the planet becomes a "global village." Let’s take this analogy one step further and deduce the future of telecommunications. If computing is embedded in everything and connectivity becomes everywhere, then we can imagine a world in which communication devices are less visible and information flows less intrusively.

If we look at telecommunication, the primary intent has been to communicate across a distance.

CLOUD COMPUTING

Every few years a new technology comes along, drives new efficiencies and reduces costs. While this is welcomed by user organizations, there is a flip side to the happy story. One among them is cloud computing………

 Cloud computing is the use of  computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation.

There are many types of public cloud computing

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
• Software as a service (SaaS)
• Storage as a service (STaaS)
• Security as a service (SECaaS)
• Data as a service (DaaS)
• Test environment as a service (TEaaS)
• Desktop as a service (DaaS)
• API as a service (APIaaS)

Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale similar to a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network. At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services.

History

The origin of the term cloud computing is obscure, but it appears to derive from the practice of using drawings of stylized clouds to denote networks in diagrams of computing and communications systems. The word cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the standardized use of a cloud-like shape to denote a network on telephony schematics and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. The cloud symbol was used to represent the Internet as early as 1994.

In the 1990s, telecommunications companies who previously offered primarily dedicated point-to-point data circuits began offering virtual private network (VPN) services with comparable quality of service but at a much lower cost. By switching traffic to balance utilization as they saw fit, they were able to utilize their overall network bandwidth more effectively. The cloud symbol was used to denote the demarcation point between that which was the responsibility of the provider and that which was the responsibility of the users. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network infrastructure.

 In early 2008, Eucalyptus became the first open-source, AWS API-compatible platform for deploying private clouds. In early 2008, OpenNebula, enhanced in the RESERVOIR European Commission-funded project, became the first open-source software for deploying private and hybrid clouds, and for the federation of clouds. In the same year, efforts were focused on providing quality of service guarantees (as required by real-time interactive applications) to cloud-based infrastructures, in the framework of the IRMOS European Commission-funded project, resulting to a real-time cloud environment.

On March 1, 2011, IBM announced the Smarter Computing framework to support Smarter Planet. Among the various components of the Smarter Computing foundation, cloud computing is a critical piece.

In 2012, Dr. Biju John and Dr. Souheil Khaddaj describe the cloud as a virtualized, semantic source of information: "Cloud computing is a universal collection of data which extends over the internet in the form of resources (such as information hardware, various platforms, services etc.) and forms individual units within the virtualization environment.

What Is Cloud Computing?

Personal cloud computing means having every piece of data you need for every aspect of your life at your fingertips and ready for use. Data must be mobile, transferable, and instantly accessible. The key to enabling the portable and interactive you is the ability to synch up your data among your devices, as well as access to shared data. Shared data is the data we access online in any number of places, such as social networks, banks, blogs, newsrooms, paid communities, etc.

Ultimately, your personal cloud—which includes everything from your address book and music collection to your reports and documents for work—will connect to the public cloud and other personal clouds. Everything connects. That means every place on the Internet you interact with, as well as every person you interact with can be connected.

USES OF CLOUD COMPUTING

Some of the user benefits of cloud computing are:

1. Users only pay for the services that they consume.

2. Since several people will be using a single computing resource, software licensing will be simplified.

3. Users need not worry about upgrading and maintaining the software. This will be handled by the cloud service provider.

4. Users need not purchase expensive PCs with huge, monolithic operating systems. They will only need to implement a simple PC – perhaps just a “net-book” PC running the new Google OS – to access the powerful applications running in the cloud. These simple inexpensive PCs are known as “thin clients.”

5. Extremely low power thin clients may be used to access cloud resources, thus saving on power consumption.

6. Thin clients need not have advanced software, so there will be fewer dead PCs in our landfills.

7. Users may enjoy ubiquitous access to their applications, whether they’re in a hotel bar or sitting at home in front of the TV.

TYPES OF CLOUD COMPUTING

 Public cloud

Public cloud applications, storage, and other resources are made available to the general public by a service provider. These services are free or offered on a pay-per-use model. Generally, public cloud service providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft and Google own and operate the infrastructure and offer access only via Internet (direct connectivity is not offered).

 Community cloud

Community cloud shares infrastructure between several organizations from a specific community with common concerns (security, compliance, jurisdiction, etc.), whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. The costs are spread over fewer users than a public cloud (but more than a private cloud), so only some of the cost savings potential of cloud computing are realized.
 hybrid cloud
Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment models.
By utilizing "hybrid cloud" architecture, companies and individuals are able to obtain degrees of fault tolerance combined with locally immediate usability without dependency on internet connectivity. Hybrid cloud architecture requires both on-premises resources and off-site (remote) server-based cloud infrastructure.
Hybrid clouds lack the flexibility, security and certainty of in-house applications. Hybrid cloud provides the flexibility of in house applications with the fault tolerance and scalability of cloud based services.

 Private cloud

Private cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally. Undertaking a private cloud project requires a significant level and degree of engagement to virtualize the business environment, and it will require the organization to reevaluate decisions about existing resources. When it is done right, it can have a positive impact on a business, but every one of the steps in the project raises security issues that must be addressed in order to avoid serious vulnerabilities.
They have attracted criticism because users "still have to buy, build, and manage them" and thus do not benefit from less hands-on management, essentially "[lacking] the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept".
CLOUD ENGINEERING-SAVE HUMANITY!!!
Experiments should be carried out into creating artificial clouds to fight global warming, scientists have argued. Clouds generated by special ships at sea would reflect solar heat back into space, so serving to cool the planet. In fact that's exactly what is happening, so - assuming for the moment that global warming is a real and terrible menace

In essence the idea would be to exploit the already-known phenomenon of "ship clouds", where vessels underway at sea find a long trail of cloud forming behind them. At the moment this is generally a case of water droplets coalescing around particulates emitted from the ship's exhaust funnel, but this would be impractical and polluting on a scale that could affect the global climate.

Rather, the idea being touted here is to use special vessels which would spout huge amounts of sea salt particles - generated from the ocean - into the air as they went along. Water droplets should then form around the particles, creating long-lived clouds that wouldn't have any polluting qualities

CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITY

As cloud computing is achieving increased popularity, concerns are being voiced about the security issues introduced through adoption of this new model. The effectiveness and efficiency of traditional protection mechanisms are being reconsidered as the characteristics of this innovative deployment model can differ widely from those of traditional architectures. An alternative perspective on the topic of cloud security is that this is but another, although quite broad, case of "applied security" and that similar security principles that apply in shared multi-user mainframe security models apply with cloud security.
The relative security of cloud computing services is a contentious issue that may be delaying its adoption. Physical control of the Private Cloud equipment is more secure than having the equipment off site and under someone else’s control. Physical control and the ability to visually inspect the data links and access ports is required in order to ensure data links are not compromised. Issues barring the adoption of cloud computing are due in large part to the private and public sectors' unease surrounding the external management of security-based services. It is the very nature of cloud computing-based services, private or public, that promote external management of provided services.

Cloud Computing Architecture

               

·         The Cloud Computing Architecture of a cloud solution is the structure of the system, which comprises of on-premise and cloud resources, services, middleware, and software components, their geo-location, their externally visible properties and the relationships between them.

• Cloud architecture typically involves multiple cloud components communicating with each other over a loose coupling mechanism such as a messaging queue. Elastic provisioning implies intelligence in the use of tight or loose coupling of cloud resources, services, middleware, and software components.

• In the area of cloud computing, protection depends on having the right architecture for the right application. Organizations must understand the individual requirements of their applications, and if already using a cloud platform, understand the corresponding cloud architecture.

• A cloud computing architecture consists of a front end and a back end. They connect to each other through a network, usually the Internet. The front end is the side the computer user, or client, sees. The back end is the “cloud” section of the system.
• Advantages of Cloud computing Architecture:
• reduced administration effort
• contract flexibility (pay as you go)
• availability and elasticity

Cloud computing's the future

                

In an era of rapid technological obsolescence, no computing device's future is assured. With cloud computing offering unparalleled convenience and portability to the user, the same could be said for the future of the personal computer. Cloud computing means that people can have access to their digital files and software on the go, with little more needed to access them than simple input and output devices as well as an internet connection. Amazon has launched two new products, Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, which allow users to tap cloud computing and store all their music and video files on a network of remote storage facilities. While such bold new products ensure ease and affordability for current users, they also herald a future where not only the denizens of New York and London but also the poor from India to Africa, can take advantage of the opportunities provided by computers.
The view of cloud computing remains mixed as the technology brings benefits and risks in equal measures