电信(英)

    Telecommunication refers to communication over long distances. In practice, something of the message may be lost in the process. Telecommunication covers all forms of distance and/or conversion 2 of the original communications, including radio, telegraphy, television, telephony, data communication and computer networking.

    The elements of a telecommunication system are a transmitter, a medium (line) and possibly a channel imposed upon the medium (see baseband and broadband as well as multiplexing), and a receiver. The transmitter is a device that transforms or encodes the message into a physical phenomenon; the signal. The transmission medium, by its physical nature, is likely to modify or degrade the signal on its path from the transmitter to the receiver. The receiver has a decoding 3 mechanism 4 capable of recovering the message within certain limits of signal degradation 5. Sometimes, the final receiver is the human eye and/or ear (or in some extreme cases other sensory 6 organs) and the recovery of the message is done by the brain (see psychoacoustics.)

    Telecommunication can be point-to-point, point-to-multipoint or broadcasting, which is a particular form of point-to-multipoint that goes only from the transmitter to the receivers.

    One of the roles of the telecommunications engineer is to analyse the physical properties of the line or transmission medium, and the statistical 8 properties of the message in order to design the most effective encoding and decoding mechanisms 9.

    When systems are designed to communicate through human sensory organs (mainly those for vision and hearing), physiological 10 and psychological characteristics of human perception must be taken into account. This has important economic implications and engineers must research what defects can be tolerated in the signal and not significantly degrade the viewing or hearing experience.

    Examples of human (tele)communications

    In a simplistic example, consider a normal conversation between two people. The message is the sentence that the speaker decides to communicate to the listener. The transmitter is the language areas in the brain, the motor cortex, the vocal 11 cords, the larynx, and the mouth that produce those sounds called speech. The signal is the sound waves (pressure fluctuations 12 in air particles) that can be identified as speech. The channel is the air carrying those sound waves, and all the acoustic 7 properties of the surrounding space: echoes, ambient noise, reverberation 13. Between the speaker and the listener, there might be other devices that do or do not introduce their own distortions of the original vocal signal (for example a telephone, a HAM radio, an IP phone, etc.) The receiver is the listener's ear and auditory system, the auditory nerve, and the language areas in the listener's brain that will decode 14 the signal into information and filter out background noise.

    All channels have. Another important aspect of the channel is called the bandwidth. A low bandwidth channel, such as a telephone, cannot carry all of the audio information that is transmitted in normal conversation, causing distortion and irregularities in the speaker's voice, as compared to normal, in-person speech.