1- Dial Up

Before the advent of faster transmission technologies, dial up was the standard with home users capped at approximately 56K, the speed at which data could travel over twisted pair. Many rural areas, who have not yet been put into the DSL or cable infrastructure, must rely on dial up to access the internet.
2- DSL (fast connections from your phone cable)

DSL, which in some areas is being transmitted over fiber optic lines is the method of transmission used through a telephone infrastructure. To minimize the interference caused by frequencies carried on the voice line not recognized by the modem, home users are provided with filters, which are placed onto phone jacks where phones are present. While upgrading transmission medium alongside implementation of means within which the signal is boosted, DSL is often criticized for its loss of speed the further away from the Central Office,
3- Cable (fast connections by Cable, now with fiber optics cable)

Cable internet, a close competitor to DSL, is also transmitted over fiber optic lines in some areas. Cable, however, transmitted through coaxial, rather than twisted pair, does not carry the same limitations as DSL, in that voice and data are more easily separated. Critics of cable transmission argue congestion will affect speed and that the more users in a given period, without a suitable infrastructure to support them, will reduce speed considerably.

4- Satellite

Transmitting a signal outside of the atmosphere and back again is going to cause some serious latency, so satellite is not the best choice, for those who have a choice over dial up. In fact, the limitations on delivering very high speed data required for multimedia such as streaming video, make the acquisition of satellite questionable for anyone looking beyond simple browsing and correspondence through e-mail. The need for a dish, to be installed, adds to the cost versus benefit equation. Satellite’s role in the information highway seems limited to those who have no other access whatsoever.


5- Cellular

3G and 4G are terms used within “mobile wireless”, a redundancy all of its own. Smart phones seem to have evolved in the same manner as the Internet did, with texting finding its way into browsing, and the addition of other apps. As ‘mobile wireless” finds its way into larger hardware units, such as the iPad and some laptops, finding access to the internet now becomes as simple as finding an available signal. Speed for the transmission is suitable for cell phones and small apps but has not yet reached anywhere near the level required to compete with land based options, unless complete portability is a factor.

Frame Relay is a transfer mode above X.25. Relying on a more credible physical link, frame relay, while a packet switching technology, is not as concerned with error checking or correction, as this is able to happen a different layer, but does contain, within packet headers the means to deal with network congestion, with the ability to prioritize delivery information , and drop unnecessary information when called for.

Asynchronous Transfer Mode is focused on delivering multimedia content, mindful that current connections are not always so compatible as to be efficient. While ATM does use packet switching, its role seeks to minimalize delays that would interfere with one medium while not with another. ATM, then, taking advantage of faster physical link capability, is performed at a hardware level, providing for a faster resolution of data analysis and conversion. ATM’s main benefit is its ability to prioritize data types based on their content to achieve a reliable level of service.

Key to the difference between FR and ATM is ATM’s standard length 53kb cell, 48 kb content and 5kb header. Further, ATM is able to take advantage of Time Division Multiplexing. While ATM small cell size makes its less efficient than frame relay’s ability to send an entire payload in a single frame, its logical transmission of multimedia makes up for the inefficiency in transmission speed.

It was not until 1952 that AT&T had a marketing department. As a government sanctioned monopoly, they did not have to worry about attracting customers, as customers had no other choice. Management’s concern was maintaining that delicate balance, and while Congress had imposed a price cap on their services, AT&T management was careful not to shake the henhouse, as it were. The philosophy was simple. As long as they had a monopoly, they could charge their standard rates nationwide and having a captive market was lucrative enough not to want more.

In 1956, a man named Tom Carter, after four years of judicial sparring, successfully sued the FCC for his right to market his innovative “Hush a Phone”, a device designed to compliment the standard phone receiver in order to allow for whispering into it. In hindsight, the Hush-a-Phone seems like primitive technology and by today’s standards it is. Meant to mimic the function of cupping ones hand over the phone, the device was not much more than a piece of rubber attached to a receiver.

However, this small device had a ripple effect, allowing competing technologies to offer, at least, peripheral devices to augment AT&T’s empire. This was something AT&T was unaccustomed to. Telephone lines seemed the only manner in which a nation could connect voice from East to West, and bridge to other parts of the world. However, MCI soon began constructing microwave towers.

Carter went on to develop another device in the 1970’s which would provide for radio to be patched into the local telephone loop.

In 1984, , the slumber under which telecommunications had fallen was broken as AT&T’s monopoly ended. Suddenly, baby bells had to worry about their infrastructures. High speed data transfer was in its infancy, cell phone towers were being constructed and research, marketing and acquiring new technologies had gone from irrelevant to vital for success.

Instead of being defined by monopoly suppliers and regulators, the telecommunications/information infrastructure has become more closely defined by both market demand and the explosion of supporting technologies that have been brought to market by myriad suppliers. There has been much movement away from a supplier-defined infrastructure to a user- and market-defined infrastructure.

Whether we would be at the technological level we are today, had AT&T not been fragmented is an interesting question. Had the company been allowed to maintain its stranglehold on local infrastructure, customers would have been only been able to access what was available. A rush to facilitate higher speeds may have seemed redundant by a monopoly whose profits were already capped. In essence, while varied services would have offered the company additional revenue, they had no external push to better their offerings. As a result, advances in the infrastructure would have been at the mercy of one company’s willingness, and not spurred on by a competitor, it is likely that those changes would have come much later

References

Aufderheide, P. (2006). The 1996 Telecommunications Act: Ten Years Later. Federal Communications Law Journal, 58(3), 407+.

Lemke, T. (2001, December 17). Cable, DSL or Satellite? High-Speed Internet Connections Can Download Information 50 Times Faster Than a Standard 56-Kilobyte Modem. but Technology Hasn't Caught Up with Demand. Insight on the News, 17, 28+..

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