Glossary of Metropolitan Broadband Terms: A-E

Access Point - Also known as an AP, an access point is a wireless hub or "base station" that transmits and receives Wi-Fi wireless data traffic in a typical range of 100 to 500 feet. An external antenna can extend that range. An access point is usually attached to a wired LAN which is connected through a router back to the Internet. Access points are easy to set up and range in price from under $100 to over $1,000. They are available from companies such as Linksys, Proxim, Tropos, D-Link, Netgear, Cisco and many others.

Anchor Tenant - One definition of anchor tenant is an influential organization in a network that owns the resources and "leases" network access to tenants. In the case of local government, tenants would be other city departments and organizations, not-for-profits, community groups, businesses, educational institutions, and others. Another definition is a primary tenant on a long-term contract that covers a fixed amount of the costs of the network, thereby reducing the risk of the capital investment by assuring recovery of a portion of the investment. With one or more anchor tenants, a network provider can be more flexible in pricing of services to retail clients and theoretically, gain more market share.

ASP - ASP is an acronym for Application Service Provider, a company that provides remote access to applications, typically over the Internet, as an alternative to purchasing software licenses and running them on your own servers or computers. ASPs are used when an organization finds it more cost effective to have someone else host its applications than to host them itself. The applications served up can be as simple as access to a remote fileserver, or as complex as running an order entry system through your browser. The ASP provides the servers, network access, and applications to be used, typically for a monthly or yearly subscription fee.

Backhaul - Short for Internet backhaul, this term refers to the transportation of data from the field back to the Internet. Every wireless local area network provides local area bandwidth, but also requires connection to the mother of all networks, the Internet - that's what backhaul is about. The amount of backhaul capacity ("size of the pipe") will impact how well the wireless network performs, and how many subscribers the LAN will support. While my search on Wikipedia did not turn up this term in the Internet context, it did talk about TV broadcast usages, and I suspect that truckers also refer to something like Internet backhaul when they seek out a load to carry in their empty trucks on their way back to their original starting point. The size of the truck will determine how much load can be "hauled back."

Bit - This is where the education on digital computing begins. Information is coded as a series of 0s and 1s in digital binary language, the language of compuiers and other digital devices. These discrete 0s and 1s are known as "bits."

Byte - A Byte is the (almost) most basic standard measurement of data storage in use. Essentially, a "byte" is a packet of 8-bits of information. See this excellent Wikipedia link for a full detailed description of "bits and bytes."

Blog - A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a website of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order), often a diary of personal perspectives. Blogs range in scope from individual diaries to arms of political campaigns, media programs, and corporations. They range in scale from the writings of one occasional author, to the collaboration of a large community of writers. Many blogs enable visitors to leave public comments, which can lead to a community of readers centered around the blog; others are non-interactive. The totality of weblogs or blog-related websites is often called the blogosphere. When a large amount of activity, information and opinion erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it is sometimes called a blogstorm or blog swarm. Unwiremycity.com is a blog, which uses Movable Type blog software. See also Blog, Understanding the Information Revolution by Hugh Hewitt in the Books section.

BPL - BPL is an acronym for Broadband over Power Lines, and is a form of PLC, or Power Line Carrier, a technology that uses existing electric utility lines to bring a wired information signal to the end user. In the case of BPL, the wired signal is broadband, running at speeds that typically range between 1.5 and 4 Mbps per subscriber. The technology is not wireless or mobile. On installing BPL end point modems, each electrical socket in the facility becomes an access point.

Broadband Internet access - Broadband Internet access, often shortened to "broadband Internet" or just "broadband" is a high data-transmission rate internet connection. DSL and cable modem, both popular consumer broadband technologies, are typically capable of transmitting 512 kilobits per second (kbit/s) or more, approximately nine times the speed of a modem using a standard digital telephone line. Broadband Internet access became a rapidly developing market in many areas in the early 2000s; one study found that broadband Internet usage in the United States grew from 6% in June 2000 to over 30% in 2003.[1] Modern consumer broadband implementations, up to 20 Mbit/s, are several hundred times faster than those available at the time of the birth of the internet (such as ISDN and 56 bit/s) while costing less than ISDN and sometimes no more than 56 kbit/s; though performance and costs vary widely between countries. See this blog for more discussion about the definition of broadband, a potentially volatile political topic.

Carrier - A wireless network operator is often referred to as a carrier. Carrier is also a technical radio term for the radio wave that carries voice or data.

CDMA - CDMA is an acronym for Code Division Multiple Access, a method pioneered by Qualcomm for transmitting signals over wireless networks. In CDMA, many radios transmit and receive on the network at the same time, making it very efficient. In the US, Sprint and Verizon use CDMA technology.

Council of Governments - Also known as "COGs," these regional organizations are peculiar to the USA, serve an area of several counties, addressing issues such as regional and municipal planning, economic and community development, cartography and GIS, hazard mitigation and emergency planning, aging services, water use, pollution control, transit administration, and transportation planning. Representatives from local governments serve on the boards of COGs, and funding comes from a combination of state grants and local contributions.

Digital Divide - The population can be divided into two parts: those with and those without digital devices and broadband Internet access. This "digital divide" has ever greater implications, because such modern information technologies as the telephone, television, computers and the Internet play an ever more dominant role in our daily lives. The digital divide exists not only between those in cities and those in rural areas, but also between haves and have nots inside cities. A digital divide could also be said to exist between the educated and the uneducated, between economic classes, and globally, between the industrially developed nations and the Third World.

Digital Transition -The term "Digital Transition" describes the process all organizations must go through in the 21st Century, as they leverage new technologies that provide new options for Applications, Equipment, Processes, and Networks that make them more effective. In contrast, the term "Municipal Wireless" is limiting. It puts the network technology ahead of the application and process changes that drive the business case.

A good way to understand this issue is to consider analog v. digital. Analog technology was revolutionary in the 20th century, when radio and television changed the landscape through exploitation of better understanding of how radio frequencies behaved. But with the advent of the transistor and the integrated circuit, a digital alternative was born and it matured in the second half of the twentieth century. As this digital progress was employed with the internet at the turn of the century, the potential of the transformation became apparent, and private sector companies began to leverage the new tools to be more competitive. Public sector organizations are lagging now, and have much ground to make up to be more effective.

Thus, the "analog" approach reflects a 20th century mindset that still relies upon paper-based data, labor inputs, and manual processes. A "digital" approach demonstrates a 21st century perspective that takes advantage of low-cost, high-power digital computers and storage devices, VOIP communication devices and broadband networks to transform the potential of organizations. Undergoing a digital transformation is a complex task that starts with a paradigm shift regarding the nature of the job, and a rewriting of the processes used to accomplish business objectives. Because digital technology evolves rapidly, a digital transformation is more of an ongoing process than it is an event with a beginning and an end.

DSL - DSL is an acronym for Digital Subscriber Line, a broadband data communications technology that transmits information over the copper wires that make up the local loop of the public switched telephone network. DSL bypasses the circuit-switched lines that make up that network and yields much faster data transmission rates than analog modem technologies. Further, a customer’s DSL line is a dedicated line that runs from their residence or business to the telephone network's Central Office, in contrast with Cable broadband, which does not require proximity to the Central Office, but as a shared network resource, it is prone to slower speeds when many users are on-line.

E911 - From the FCC website: "The wireless Enhanced 911 (E911) rules seek to improve the effectiveness and reliability of wireless 911 service by providing 911 dispatchers with additional information on wireless 911 calls.

The wireless E911 program is divided into two parts - Phase I and Phase II. Phase I requires carriers, upon appropriate request by a local Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), to report the telephone number of a wireless 911 caller and the location of the antenna that received the call. Phase II requires wireless carriers to provide far more precise location information, within 50 to 300 meters in most cases.

The deployment of E911 requires the development of new technologies and upgrades to local 911 PSAPs, as well as coordination among public safety agencies, wireless carriers, technology vendors, equipment manufacturers, and local wireline carriers. The FCC established a four-year rollout schedule for Phase II, beginning October 1, 2001 and to be completed by December 31, 2005."

E911 at the FCC is an attempt to work around the problem created by consumers switching from fixed telephone lines to mobile lines, and to the coming issue of Wi Fi based VoIP for 911 numbers. In a switched network, each terminal point has a unique identifier, which can be used to locate the caller in an emergency 9-1-1 telephone call. But with wireless and Wi Fi VOIP, the telephone call may not provide the necessary location information, leading to the concern over the impact such changes will have on such public safety systems.

E-Community - An E-Community is a community with a vision of the future that involves the application of information and communication technologies and broadband infrastructures in a new and innovative way to empower its residents, institutions and regions as a whole. As such, they make the most of the opportunities that new applications afford and broadband-based services can deliver and help improve the community in question. Importantly, an E-Community is not primarily focused on technology. It is about using broadband technology to enhance education, export, elderly care, experience, effectiveness, efficiency, emotions, entertainment and more.

Exabyte - An exabyte is a "buttload of data" as we would say down here in Texas. Check out this good Wikipedia link to see a useful table that describes the growing list of terms for data. From Kilobyte (1,000 bytes) to Megabyte (1,000,000) to Gigabyte (1,000,000,000) - see a pattern here? - to Terabyte (1,000,000,000,000) to Petabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000) to Exabyte (1,000,000,000,000,000,000), the list goes on and on. Oh, there's two more categories - "Zettabyte" and "Yottabyte," but let's not go there for now. To get a better idea of Orders of Magnitude, and how they all fit together, with some pertinent real-world examples, see this link.

ExaFlood - From Wikipedia: the word exabyte is the basis for the term "exaflood", a neologism created by Bret Swanson of the Discovery Institute in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial.[12] Exaflood refers to the rapidly increasing torrent of data transmitted over the Internet. The amount of information people upload, download and share on the Internet is growing (due in large part to video, audio and photo applications), at an exponential rate while the capacity of the Internet, its bandwidth, is limited and susceptible to a "flood" of data.

Ethernet - Ethernet is a frame-based computer networking technology for local area networks (LANs). It defines wiring and signaling for the physical layer, and frame formats and protocols for the media access control (MAC)/ data link layer of the OSI model. Ethernet is mostly standardized as IEEE 802. It has become the most widespread LAN technology in use since networking became widespread in the 1990s, and has largely replaced all other LAN standards.