What Is Information Infrastructure?

Lecture 1

What is Information Infrastructure?

• Communications networks and associated software

• That support interaction among people and organizations

What is telecommunications?

• It is concerned with the transmission of information, or messages, from one point to another

• Beacon-fire, telegraph, telephone

What is telecommunications service?

• Offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public, or to such classes of users as to be effectively available directly to public, regardless of facilities used

What is telecommunications carrier?

• Any provider of telecommunications services, except aggregators of telecommunications services

What is telecommunications industry?

• Communications business using regulated or unregulated facilities or services and includes broadcasting, telecommunications, cable, computer, data transmission software, programming, advanced messaging, and electronic business

What is telecommunications equipment?

• Equipment, other than customer premises equipment (CPE), used by a carrier to provide telecommunications services, and includes software integral to such equipment (including upgrades)

• Home wifi – CPE
• Public wifi – telecommunications equipment

What is Customer Premises Equipment?

• Equipment employed on premises of a customer (other than a carrier) to originate, route, or terminate telecommunications

Basic Process of Telecommunications

Information source → Encoder modulator → Transmitter → Communications medium → Receiver → Demodulator decoder → Information sink

Specific Characters of Telecommunications

• What is telecommunications product?

• Physical shift of reproduction of original information

• Are telecommunications services or goods?

• Goods
• Intangibility
• Heterogeneity
• Perishability

• Why is quality of telecommunications so important?

• Simultaneous production and consumption
• Hard to compensate as consumers suffer simultaneously when telecom operator fails to maintain the quality level

How Can Signals be Transmitted

• Modulation

• Process by which a signal’s characteristics is varied according to characters of another signal

• Demodulation

• Process of retrieving intelligence (data) from a modulated carrier wave

• Reverse of modulation

Purpose of Modulation