This article is classified "Partly real, partly fictional"
This is a basic introduction to Telecomspeak. Telecom, in Telecomspeak, means telecommunications. Telecomspeak, for our purposes, is the highly technical language, full of acronyms, which is used in the telecom industry. WARNING: Telecomspeak is a controlled substance in some areas. Please consult your local legal authorities. Possible side effects include: utter unintelligibility, blank stares, being able to compete with the military in acronyms, loss of comprehension of reality, loss of mind. Before we even begin, you need to be able to know something about AT&T. AT&T: The Phone Company. If it has to do with sending data or information from one place to another, AT&T probably invented it at Bell Labs, their research arm. Although this is becoming less true with time since the breakup of AT&T's monopoly in 1984, they are still the largest telephone company ever. It is only recently that they were no longer larger than all the other telephone companies in the world combined. When in doubt about "who in the telecommunications business?", guess AT&T. Right off the bat, you need to know about bandwidth. BANDWIDTH: how much space in the wire, uplink, cable etc. a given amount of information/type of communication takes up. Usually, the more complex the service/communication, the greater the bandwidth. E-mail takes up relatively little bandwidth. Video conferencing takes up... all of the bandwidth. This is a useful term to know, you can usually stop an onslaught of telecomspeak with the simple phrase, "do you have the bandwidth to do that?" Everything hinges on bandwidth. It is all well and good to have a machine that can digitize the sensory and emotional experience of sex, or birth, if you don't have the bandwidth to send that experience to someone (and that would take more bandwidth than a few hundred full motion video Guides), it's useless in telecommunications. There have been many advances in increasing bandwidth capacity of networks. Perhaps the hoopiest of these, and one of the biggest buzzwords in the industry, is ATM. ATM: no, it is not an Automated Teller Machine, it is Asynchronous Transfer Mode. If you know that's what ATM stands for, you will be able to pass for Having A Clue in all but the most engineer-filled environments. Basically, it's a way of sending data from one place to another, not really a technology for it. ATM allows you to just blast a whole bunch of data somewhere. ATM is the current big thing. There are entire divisions in telecommunications companies dedicated to it. Bandwidth and ATM deal with telecommunications networks. NETWORKS: huge, interlinking bunches of wires, cables, uplinks, radio, etc. which transport data from point to point. The first network was the telegraph network which allowed people to send a message from one place to any number of other places without needing a dedicated line. Anything which deals with information can be networked: computers, phones, TVs. An experiment to network human brains has not been very successful; the engineers were unsure of where to plug in the serial cord and the attempts to link via microwave communications had the unfortunate side effect of death. Most networks, these days, transport digital (as opposed to analog) information. DIGITAL/ANALOG: digital is 0-s and 1-s, zeroes and ones, on and off, the way computers deal with information. Analog is the way the brain and nature deals with information, sound/light waves and such. The digital information is sometimes sent in packets and sent from point to point by switches. PACKET SWITCHING: the technology by which a whole bunch of information, (like an e-mail message) is broken up into little packages, given "to:" and "from:" addresses, then sent along its way. The packets travel through the network to a switch, which looks at the "to:" address, and gives the packet directions. From there the packets may "hit" other switches (to get their attention to get better directions.) Eventually the packets reach their end destination, where they are reassembled into the original message. A very cool sort of switch is a router. ROUTER: a highly advanced and specialized computer switch which has huge databases of directions to destinations. Entire networks are based on these machines. The Internet is a router based network. If someone has been bothering you because you haven't sent them e-mail in a while, tell them "our gateway router went down." Another type of switch is the PBX. PBX: your basic phone switch. It's the computer which connects phone calls. PBXs are usually not used for the main routing of phone calls, but rather for the introduction of a call into the larger network and for the routing of a call from the larger network to its final phone. If you know what PBX stands for you are a Telecomtechie. The Mack Daddy phone switch is the 5E. 5E (5ESS): these are some of the largest concentrations of computing capacity ever assembled. They are switches which serve as the gateways to the phone networks of entire nations. AT&T came up with these switches to downsize all of their long-distance operators. Just to give you some idea of the capacity and importance (and reliability) of these machines, New York City has something like 3 5E's for its phone switching. If one of those went down, so would most of the communications along the northeast Atlantic coast of the United States. To make people think you are the head of a really big, important company, just say, "we're looking into purchasing a 5E." WARNING: if you actually say this where people can hear you, AT&T will eventually find out, and bother you about buying one. Switches send information through the network, oftentimes through trunk lines. TRUNK LINE: a very high bandwidth cable which can handle a whole bunch of information. Formerly copper, most trunk lines are now fiberoptic cable. This should not be confused for a proposition from an elephant. Those are the basics; with that you can hold your own in a telecom conversation anywhere outside the industry itself. You ought to be able to disguise yourself in the industry pretty well too.