When you don't know the jargon, you have to bluff. One of the things I always do with my clients and audiences is give very practical advice on how to deal with representative of the telecommunications industry. How to impress them. If your telecom industry friends are stumped by this one, you need to lower the bit rate and ask something a bit easier. One reason that telecommunications is now so complex is its merger with computerization, a marriage called telematics in many places around the world.
Computers are everywhere and increasingly a part of telecommunications.
They are embedded throughout the public telephone network, including cellular. They are what all the fiber optics is attached to. I am sorry to report, that as confusing as telecommunications may seem to you, the complexity and speed of change in telecommunications is actually much worse than you perceive. You will have to re-learn old abbreviations. ATM no longer means just Automatic Teller Machine, but also Asynchronous Transfer Mode, which is something important, but not here and now.