As with the two previous chapters, the purpose is to let you know what you should and should not expect of the technology, and to provide you with enough knowledge to evaluate the features of telecommunications hardware, software, and services. Telecommunications technology serves not only the communications of data but also telephony, fax, and other forms of communication. It is important to note, though, that increasingly, all communication is digitized. Eventually all our telephone conversations will be digitized. A growing portion of the telephone network in the United States and other parts of the world support digital signals.
Students often wonder why telecommunication via modems is called asynchronous communication.
This is a misnomer. Modem communication is synchronized. Except for small LANs, networks rarely follow a single, pure topology. They often consist of combinations of several topologies. This concept is explained in more detail in Chapter 7.