The Tech Updates

communicated over a single common network

How are the new networks different? First, they are integrated, meaning that all media— be they voice, audio, video, or data—are increasingly communicated over a single common network. This integration offers economies of scope and scale in both capital expenditures and operational costs, and also allows different media to be mixed within common applications. As a result, both technology suppliers and service providers are increasingly in the business of providing telecommunications in all media simultaneously rather than specializing in a particular type such as voice, video, or data.

Second, the networks are built in layers, from the physical layer, which is concerned with the mechanical, electrical and optical, and functional and procedural means for managing network connections to the data, network, and transport layers, which are concerned with transferring data, routing data across networks between addresses, and ensuring end-to-end

connections and reliability of data transfer to the application layer, which is concerned with providing a particular functionality using the network and with the interface to the user.
More info: entry level network engineer
Both technology (equipment and software) suppliers and service providers tend to specialize in one or two of these layers, each of which seeks to serve all applications and all media. As a consequence, creating a new application may require the participation and cooperation of a set of complementary layered capabilities. This structure results in a horizontal industry structure, quite distinct from the vertically integrated industry structure of the Bell System era.

All these changes suggest a new definition of telecommunications: Telecommunications is the suite of technologies, devices, equipment, facilities, networks, and applications that support communication at a distance.

products and to service providers

The recommendations are all aimed at so-called precompetitive activities; when the time arrives for development, implementation, and deployment, it will be up to equipment and software suppliers to create and manufacture the products and to service providers to deploy the necessary facilities and services.

Determining how much funding to provide for such a telecommunications research initiative involves, of course, a complex set of budgetary tradeoffs among research programs and between research and non-research activities. The committee does not make a recommendation for a specific funding level but notes that funding should be consistent with the vital role played by telecommunications in the U.S. economy and society and with the direct contributions made by the U.S. telecommunications industry to the nation’s economy and security. Funding should also be consistent with telecommunications’ role as a critical element of information technology (some 16 percent of the total federal networking and information technology research and development budget today goes to telecommunications; see Chapter 2). Finally, the investment should be large enough to support a critical mass of researchers and research; one estimate can be drawn from the predivestiture Bell Labs, whose budget of over $500 million (in today’s dollars) for basic research was sized to provide the breadth and depth to comprehensively address telecommunications research issues.

The federal government should establish a new research organization—the Advanced Telecommunications Research Activity—to rejuvenate fundamental and applied telecommunications research in the United States and to stimulate and coordinate activities across industry, academia, and government that can translate research results into deployments of significant new telecommunications capabilities.

In light of the findings presented above, the committee believes that a new national research organization, which it dubs the Advanced Telecommunications Research Activity (ATRA), should be established by the federal government. This recommendation is inspired in large part by the enormous leaps in telecommunications technology historically attributable to DARPA and Bell Labs and the success of broad industry consortia such as SEMATECH.

More info: technical support engineer

The chief research and development arm

This phenomenon is not new. See, for example, Rosenbloom et al., Engines of Innovation, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1996several decades. The concern is that without substantial renewed investment in fundamental, long-term telecommunications research, the United States will eventually consume its own intellectual “seed corn” and thus run out of new ideas within the next decade or perhaps even sooner.
For roughly a century, the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure was largely defined by the Bell System, a telephony monopoly regulated under a series of consent decrees that gave it the right to operate, maintain, and expand the U.S. telephone system. The chief research and development arm of the Bell System, Bell Laboratories, was created in 1925, following demonstration in 1915 of the feasibility of coast-to-coast long-distance service and realization of the importance of a viable research and development laboratory to effective deployment. Successful nationwide implementation of long-distance service required, for example, a device with sufficient gain to offset the signal losses in the 3000-mile stretch of the U.S. transcontinental cable. The development of the vacuum tube amplifier for use in telephone circuits, which started in the 1910s, took many years of fundamental research and required extremely close cooperation between the research community that had originally invented the vacuum tube technology and the development community that introduced the vacuum tube amplifier into the telephone network.

Bell Laboratories relied heavily on managers who understood the benefits to the company (and society) of fundamental research and were able to provide a work environment that fostered world-class research in virtually every aspect of telecommunications technology. Stable funding for research was provided via a tax levied on the service revenues of most of the Bell operating companies, an approach approved by state regulators. The revenue from the services tax was more than sufficient to fund unfettered investigations over almost 6 decades into almost every aspect of telecommunications, from basic materials (and the associated physics and chemistry) to large-scale computing and networking platforms and systems. Over time, Bell Laboratories’ support for basic science and engineering led to major advances in telephony spanning terminals, switching, transmission, services, and operations. Out of the Bell System research program also came many world-famous innovations, including the transistor, information theory, the laser, the solar cell, communications satellites, and fiber-optic communications. Perhaps the most notable benefit of the research was the creation of the semiconductor industry as a result of the mandatory public licensing of Bell’s patent for the transistor. In addition, research in basic science at Bell Labs was recognized by six Nobel prizes for strides in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and radio astronomy.

A number of other companies were also involved at the time in developing new telecommunications technologies and equipment. The work of companies like GTE Automatic Electric, TRW Vidar, and Northern Telecom, along with Bell’s own Western Electric, pushed telephony forward through advances in handset design and digital switching
More info: junior network engineer

digital broadcasting Telecommunication Degree

Applying outmoded telecommunication regulations and rules to the internet creates more problems than it resolves.

Nuanced regulations that address the risk to users should take precedence over measures that tighten access points to

the detriment of many communities and individuals.
It would also necessitate that internet service providers keep even more data about users than they already do. The

entry barrier to the internet is currently low enough to serve as a media outlet. This supports the spread of

democratic speech because any reader or user can become a content creator.

Telecommunications professionals with an eye on leadership positions with broadcasters, cell phone companies, Internet

service providers, radio stations, and TV networks pursue master’s degrees in telecommunications. These programs allow

students to explore fundamental theories and current industry practices, with an emphasis on developing the skills

necessary to become industry leaders.
Master’s degrees in telecommunications prepare students with the technological skills, critical tools, and the

knowledge needed to perform, persuade, and communicate in our global media environment. In addition to a focus on

media industries and technologies, many programs emphasize globalism through international and comparative studies.

Just a few of the topics studied in a master’s degree in telecommunications include:

Internet-based distribution systems
Comparative studies of digital broadcasting
Media literacy and citizenship
Journalism history and media sociology
Media anthropology
These programs may be designed as:

Master of Arts in Telecommunication
Master of Arts in Digital Communication
Master of Arts in Media Studies
Master of Arts in Telecommunications and Film
Admission into a telecommunications master’s degree is dependent upon the completion of a bachelor’s degree from an

accredited college or university, a minimum undergraduate GPA, and GRE scores. It is common for institutions to also

require admission essays, references, and interviews with the admissions staff.
More info: tower climber salary

F5 Certified BIG-IP Administrator

A load balancer is a device that acts as a reverse proxy and distributes network or application traffic across a number of servers. Load balancers are used to increase capacity (concurrent users) and reliability of applications. They improve the overall performance of applications by decreasing the burden on servers associated with managing and maintaining application and network sessions, as well as by performing application-specific tasks.

Load balancers are generally grouped into two categories: Layer 4 and Layer 7. Layer 4 load balancers act upon data found in network and transport layer protocols (IP, TCP, FTP, UDP). Layer 7 load balancers distribute requests based upon data found in application layer protocols such as HTTP.

Requests are received by both types of load balancers and they are distributed to a particular server based on a configured algorithm. Some industry standard algorithms are:

Round robin
Weighted round robin
Least connections
Least response time
F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network on the most widely deployed protocols.

More info: what is f5