Information and communications technology
(ICT) is an extensional term for information technology (IT) that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals) and computers, and as well as necessary enterprise software, middleware, storage, and audiovisual systems, that enable users to access, store, transmit and manipulate information.
What is ICT in general Information and communications technology?
Telecommunication (from Latin communication, referring to the social process of information exchange, and the Greek prefix tele-, meaning distance) is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over the wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that feasible with the human voice, but with a similar scale of expediency; thus, slow systems (such as postal mail) are excluded from the field.
Information and communications technology (ICT) engineers are developing and creating a virtual world offering new services and new applications to help people both in their work and their daily lives. Nevertheless, ICT engineers are almost always constrained in their project development by the intrinsic hardware performances of calculators, storage systems, and communication systems.
The term ICT is also used to refer to the convergence of audiovisual and telephone networks with computer networks through a single cabling or link system. There are large economic incentives to merge the telephone network with the computer network system using a single unified system of cabling, signal distribution, and management. ICT is an umbrella term that includes any communication device, encompassing radio, television, cell phones, computer and network hardware, satellite systems, and so on, as well as the various services and appliances with them such as video conferencing and distance learning.
General Information and communications technology
ICT Information and communication technology is a broad subject and the concepts are evolving. It covers any product that will store, retrieve, manipulate, transmit, or receive information electronically in a digital form (e.g., personal computers, digital television, email, or robots). Theoretical differences between interpersonal-communication technologies and mass-communication technologies have been identified by the philosopher Piyush Mathur
These included Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse (inventors of the telegraph), Antonio Meucci and Alexander Graham Bell (some of the inventors and developers of the telephone, see Invention of the telephone), Edwin Armstrong and Lee de Forest (inventors of the radio), as well as Vladimir K. Zworykin, John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth (some of the inventors of the television).
Local area networks and wide area networks
Despite the growth of the Internet, the characteristics of local area networks (LANs)—computer networks that do not extend beyond a few kilometers—remain distinct. This is because networks on this scale do not require all the features associated with larger networks and are often more cost-effective and efficient without them. When they are not connected with the Internet, they also have the advantages of privacy and security. However, purposefully lacking a direct connection to the Internet does not provide assured protection from hackers, military forces, or economic powers. These threats exist if there are any methods for connecting remotely to the LAN.
Wide area networks (WANs) are private computer networks that may extend for thousands of kilometers. Once again, some of their advantages include privacy and security. Prime users of private LANs and WANs include armed forces and intelligence agencies that must keep their information secure and secret.
In the mid-1980s, several sets of communication protocols emerged to fill the gaps between the data-link layer and the application layer of the OSI reference model. These included Appletalk, IPX, and NetBIOS with the dominant protocol set during the early 1990s being IPX due to its popularity with MS-DOS users. TCP/IP existed at this point, but it was typically only used by large government and research facilities.[129]
As the Internet grew in popularity and its traffic was required to be routed into private networks, the TCP/IP protocols replaced existing local area network technologies. Additional technologies, such as DHCP, allowed TCP/IP-based computers to self-configure in the network. Such functions also existed in the AppleTalk/ IPX/ NetBIOS protocol sets.
Whereas Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) or Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) are typical data-link protocols for larger networks such as WANs; Ethernet and Token Ring are typical data-link protocols for LANs. These protocols differ from the former protocols in that they are simpler, e.g., they omit features such as quality of service guarantees, and offer collision prevention. Both of these differences allow for more economical systems.
Despite the modest popularity of IBM Token Ring in the 1980s and 1990s, virtually all LANs now use either wired or wireless Ethernet facilities. At the physical layer, most wired Ethernet implementations use copper twisted-pair cables (including the common 10BASE-T networks). However, some early implementations used heavier coaxial cables and some recent implementations (especially high-speed ones) use optical fibers. When optic fibers are used, the distinction must be made between multimode fibers and single-mode fibers. Multimode fibers can be thought of as thicker optical fibers that are cheaper to manufacture devices for, but that suffers from less usable bandwidth and worse attenuation—implying poorer long-distance performance of General Information and communications technology
ICTs involve much more than just access to information or the technology of the computer, implied by conventional discussion of the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ ICTs shape an individual’s, household’s, firm’s, or nation’s access to information, people, services, and technology. The concept of tele-access highlights how ICTs shape access—both electronically mediated and unmediated—to a wide
The satisfaction of users is then the key to ICT business and must be specified in a service-level agreement (SLA) signed by ICT experts and their customers. By definition, SLA is not a technical document and must be understandable by all stakeholders who are not necessarily aware of ICT terms. Two major issues should be analyzed during the SLA specification: the identification of relationships between the performance indicators defined by the user’s application and ICT technical performances and one related to the monitoring of these indicators to be sure that the contract is fulfilled.
