Frank you need to participate more often. You offered more in one post than I do in 100. For those that need some expanded definitions on what Frank, Martin and Temp are talking about
ADSL
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line - supposedly the next form of data communication because it will deliver and receive information on our current telephone lines at a much greater rate, or higher bandwidth speed. ADSL solves the bandwidth bottleneck to your home or business, over lines that already exist, your copper twisted pair telephone line. ADSL can transmit megabits, enough to outrun the Internet. ADSL will start connecting real customers in 1997.
Once some special hardware is set up, an extremely nice thing about an ADSL connection is that it is possible to have one telephone line sharing at the same time both voice and computer modem access (since the ADSL signal is carried on a higher frequency than normal telephone communications).
adsl.com
ATM
Asynchronous Transfer Mode - A high speed networking scheme and communication protocol designed with the transfer of multimedia data in mind.
POTS or PSTN
plain old telephone system or public switched telephone network the collection of interconnected systems operated by the various telephone companies and administrations(PTTs) around the world. The PSTN or POTS started as human-operated analogue circuit switching systems (plugboards), progressed through electromechanical switches and are now (1994) almost completely digital except for the final connection to the subscriber. Other things that make the PSTN less than bit-transparent include A-law to mu-law conversion or vice versa on international calls; robbed-bit signalling in North America (56kbps <--> 64 kbps); data compression to save bandwidth on long-haul trunks; signal processing such as echo suppression and voice signal enhancement such as AT&T TrueVoice. All this is in contrast to an integrated services digital network or ISDN.
ISDN
Integrated Services Digital Network - Provides the fastest commercially available link to the Internet. ISDN is a set of communications standards allowing a single wire or optical fibre to carry voice, digital network services and video. ISDN is intended to eventually replace the plain old telephone system or POTS.
ISDN was first published as one of the 1984 ITU-T Red Book recommendations. The 1988 Blue Book recommendations added many new features. ISDN uses mostly existing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) switches and wiring, upgraded so that the basic "call" is a 64 kilobits per second, all-digital end-to-end channel. Packet and frame modes are also provided in some places.
TCP/IP
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol - This set of protocols makes TELNET, FTP, e-mail, and other services possible among computers that don't belong to the same network.
protocol
A specification that describes how computers will talk to each other on a network.
Telnet
An Internet program for connecting to a remote host or server. The Telnet interface is text based and a user usually has to enter their login name and password before gaining access to the system. Some of the things you can do with Telnet access include: check your e-mail, download a program, or chat with other Telnet users.
It is one of the oldest Internet activities and is primarily used to access online databases or to read articles stored on university servers. It is also possible to Telnet via your Web browser by changing the http:// to telnet:// and entering in the site's address.
FTP
File Transfer Protocol - The common procedure or protocol used for downloading and uploading files via the Internet.
With FTP you can login to another Internet site and transfer files. Some sites have public file archives that you can access by using FTP with the account name "anonymous" and your e-mail address as password. This type of access is called anonymous ftp. Macintosh users use a program called Fetch and one of the best FTP programs for Windows is WS-FTP.
Hope this is helpful
Seth |
