telecommunications

Technology

2022

We explain what telecommunications are, its history and impact on society. Also, careers in telecommunications.

Telecommunications include many technologies such as GPS, the Internet, and television.

What are telecommunications?

When we talk about telecommunications, we refer to the science and the practice of transmitting information through electromagnetic means, through the use of a set of techniques and specialized materials. Such information may consist of data textual, audio, video, or a combination of all three.

The term telecommunication comes from the French word telecommunication, composed of the prefix Greek TV-, "distance", and the Latin word communicare, "to share". It was coined by the engineer and writer Édouard Estaunié (1862-1942) at the beginning of the 19th century, as a replacement for the term until then used for the communication by electrical impulses: telegraphy.

Within the concept of telecommunications we can find today numerous technologies, from radio, television, telephony, computer networks and Internet, to radionavigation, GPS and telemetry. In almost all cases, these are systems equipped with:

  • An issuer. That encodes and transmits the signal through different means or channels.
  • One or more receivers. They receive and decode the signal, and may in turn (or not) serve as transmitters.
  • Repeaters, routers and switches. Which are devices designed to intensify, modify, channel or repeat the signal sent by the transmitter.

One can also speak of Engineering in telecommunications or, simply, telecommunications, to refer to the study of this type of technology, with a view to its management, improvement and innovation.

History of telecommunications

The invention of the telegraph started telecommunications and gave way to the telephone.

The human being It has tried to overcome the distances to send and receive signals from very early times. For this he used smoke signals, sounds instrumentals, human messengers or chains of fire signals.

However, only with the appearance of postal mail in its different versions, some older than others, did a true remote communication system appear. It was generally aimed at communicating with the king or the imperial metropolis, with their distant subjects or with their territories colonial.

For its part, the first rapid remote communication systems were created in the Modern age, when thanks to the domain of the electricity, the way arose to use it to transmit simple messages, generally limited to a word, by means of the telegraph.

Inspired by old optical versions that depended on encoding a message with symbols visible from a distance, in the first half of the 19th century the first forms of the electric telegraph were developed, revolutionizing the field of communications through Morse code.

This invention was consolidated in the following years as the great modern means of communication, especially in the United States, thanks to the expansion of the railways. It served as the basis for future inventions, such as the "talking telegraph" (telephone) or "wireless telegraphy" (radiocommunication).

In the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, the telephone was developed, an invention of Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) and / or Elisha Gray (1835-1901). In addition, experiences Scientists and inventors such as Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) and Aleksandr Popov (1859-1905) constituted a scientific revolution and technology in the area of ​​telecommunications.

The invention of the first radio transmitter by Guillermo Marconi (1874-1937), gave rise to devices as diverse as the teletype or short wave radio transmitter, and in the 20th century to transistor radio and television.Never has the human being managed to communicate so much and over such long distances as from then on.

Finally, after the invention of computers and its incorporation into networks exchange of information, new technologies were added: modems, sonar, microwaves, satellites telecommunications, cellular telephony, Wifi and other contemporary modes of transmission of digitized information by electromagnetic waves.

Types of telecommunications

Radio is still in force as a mass medium and to communicate in isolated places.

There are many ways to classify telecommunications, according to different elements. For example, we can distinguish between unidirectional communications, those in which the sender is always the sender, and the bidirectional ones, in which the receivers eventually also occupy the role of sender, that is, there is feedback.

On the other hand, taking into account the nature of its specific technology, we can differentiate between:

  • Radio communications It not only refers to the transmission of radio waves in AM and FM from commercial stations, whose programming must be retrieved by the public on their radio devices, but also to short-wave radio devices, such as those used for navigation and radio stations. military communications.
  • Telephony. Graham Bell's old wireline telephony was replaced throughout the 20th century by an entire modern telephone industry, employing satellites and broadcast towers to send and receive electromagnetic signals from frequency which the device then converts into sound waves, recovering the speaker's voice with minimal distortion and delay.
  • TV. The great invention that revolutionized masive means of comunication in the 20th century, it has survived by adapting to the times, through satellite broadcasts or streaming via the Internet, to bring both audio and images to the receiving devices in each home, either live and direct, or delayed.
  • Internet. Today practically everything is connected to the Internet, the great network of computer networks, which allows the reciprocal sending of information over enormous distances. It is an intricate network of reciprocally interconnected computers, to share an immense volume of data of any nature, through fiberglass cables, coaxial cables or through radio waves (WiFi). The Internet allows various services such as world Wide Web, the email, the streaming service, etc.
  • Fax. A technology that is now extinct, but that serves as an example, and that consisted of using telephone lines to send the reproduction of an image taken from a text, that is to say, something similar to a photocopier, whose originals were nevertheless far away. Since the advent of the Internet, it has been considered obsolete and abandoned throughout the world.

Impact of telecommunications

Telecommunications today play a vital role in most technological systems, both in the commercial and financial spheres, as well as in the military, recreational or cultural spheres. Its effects have forever modified the way we relate and communicate among human beings.

They have allowed the emergence of a culture more homogeneous (the "global" or 2.0 culture, for example), at the same time that they have allowed new forms of commercial exchange and new services. It has quickly become one of the areas of greatest innovation, of greater demand and greater capitals of the contemporary world.

Career in telecommunications

The study of telecommunications is carried out from very different approaches, each one represented in a university degree or a similar degree, which includes degrees as different as they are, among others:

  • Telecommunications engineering
  • Web developer
  • Superior Technique in computer networks
  • University technician in telecommunications

The telecommunications study has a clear technological profile, oriented towards applied science and electronic, industrial and materials engineering.

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