Telecommunication equipment

The telephone is among the most widely used communication equipment in the world. The telephone system has been greatly enhanced and become a widely accepted communication apparatus in households and offices since its invention. The examples include the telephone answering system found in households, the voice mail system used in office environments. A significant contribution to the growth of telecommunications industry has been the high demand for radio communication services, such as cordless telephone service. Cordless telephones provide greater flexibility than traditional landline phones by permitting a user to move freely and not be physically restricted by a telephone cord. Wireless networks are an increasingly popular means of personal communications. People are using mobile terminals such as cellular telephones and fixed wireless terminals so that they can readily stay in touch with others. Cellular mobile telephony provides voice and data links between users of mobile devices and fixed devices on a network. It gives users mobility without regard to how they are actually connected to the network. Telecommunications networks are shifting from a circuit-switched architecture to a packet-switched architecture. The packet-switched networks allow dynamic bandwidth, and can be connectionless networks with no dedicated circuit or connection-oriented networks with virtual circuits having dedicated bandwidth along a predetermined path. The growing availability and applicability of the Internet has spawned a growth in the use of communication systems and services offering Internet protocol (IP) telephony. A Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system enables the transmission of telephone calls over an IP data network such as the Internet. A VoIP system handles a telephone call over most of the network as just another stream of data. Fiber optic communication technology has been developing at a rapid pace. Many advanced communication systems transmit information through a plurality of optical communication channels. Fiber optic cables are increasingly being used for communicating wide bandwidths of data at high data transmission rates. Power line communication systems have been developed for the purposes of permitting a central communication station to transmit and receive messages from remote devices. The power line communication technology utilizes a power line as a signal transmission channel.