Wireless Telecommunications
Lesson 1: Introduction

CTNS Study Guide and Companion Reference Textbook

7" x 9" softcover book • 362 pages

Six in one! This invaluable companion reference book and study guide contains all of the text and the main graphic from every lesson in all six online courses.

also available as an eBook
on amazon (for any device),   iBooks, and Google Play Books.

Overview of Courses in the CTNS Certification Package

Invest in yourself with Teracom’s CTNS Certification Package, eight online courses delivering a solid foundation in telecom, datacom and networking: understanding the fundamentals, technologies, jargon and buzzwords, and most importantly, the underlying ideas and how it all fits together… plus TCO Certification to prove it:

2241 Introduction to Broadband Converged IP Telecom
2206 Wireless Telecommunications
2221 Fundamentals of Voice over IP
2201 The PSTN
2212 OSI Layers and Protocol Stacks
2211 LANs, VLANs, Wireless and Optical Ethernet
2213 IP Addresses, Packets and Routers
2214 MPLS and Carrier Networks

Benefit from decades of knowledge, insight and experience distilled into clear lessons, logically organized to build one concept on another. Get a major career-enhancing and productivity-enhancing knowledge upgrade – learning that you can't get on the job, reading magazines or talking to vendors.

Based on Teracom’s famous week-long instructor-led BOOT CAMP, the selection of material, its order, timing, and explanations are field-tested to deliver the core up-to-date knowledge set for today’s telecommunications.

The first four CTNS courses are on telecommunications, beginning with Introduction to Broadband Converged IP Telecom, an introduction and first pass through all of the topics; followed by Introduction to Voice over IP, then Wireless Telecommunications, including 5G and Wi-Fi 6, and the PSTN.

Introduction to Broadband Converged IP Telecom is a high-level wide-ranging introduction to the world of modern IP telecommunications.

This course is based on the first chapter of Teracom's famous instructor-led BOOT CAMP, getting a full week of training started with an introduction to all of the different aspects of the modern converged IP telecom network.

Designed specifically for non-engineers, It's a first pass through the topics, starting at the beginning, explaining the fundamental ideas, jargon, equipment and technologies, the services that are sold, the players, where the money is, and how it all fits together.

In subsequent courses, we'll take another pass and drill deeper into key areas like Wireless, VoIP, PSTN, Ethernet, IP and MPLS.

This is quite a range of knowledge, and can appear daunting, especially if you are new to telecom. Keep in mind that this course is the introduction, the first pass through all of these topics.

No-one is expecting anyone to be an instant expert!

In subsequent courses, we take a second and sometimes third pass through the topics and drill deeper to more fully understand the concepts and technologies.

With this course, we're getting started identifying and understanding all of the aspects of modern broadband converged IP telecommunications.

Based on Teracom's famous Course 101, tuned and refined over the course of more than 20 years of instructor-led training, we'll cut through the jargon to demystify modern IP telecommunications, explaining the jargon and buzzwords, the underlying ideas, and how it all works together… in plain English.

We begin with basic concepts and terminology involved in mobile networks, including base stations and transceivers, mobile switches and backhaul, handoffs, cellular radio concepts and digital radio concepts.

Next, we understand how phone calls are made over radio and how they connect to landlines; and how mobile internet is implemented, tethered modems and mobile Wi-Fi hotspots.

Without bogging down on details, we'll review spectrum-sharing technologies: FDMA for first generation; 2G GSM/TDMA, 3G CDMA and 4G and 5G OFDM.

We'll understand how modems represent bits on subcarriers in OFDM, and how OFDMA is used in 4G and 5G to dynamically assign subcarrier(s) to users.

This is followed with Wi-Fi, or more precisely, 802.11 wireless LANs: the system components, frequency bands, bitrates and coverage for all of the versions up to Wi-Fi 6 which is 802.11ax, the first Wi-Fi to implement full-duplex communications with multiple simultaneous devices using OFDMA and a theoretical 9.6 Gb/s.

The course is completed with communications satellites, in Geosynchronous Earth Orbit and Low Earth Orbit, including Iridium Next and Starlink.

You'll gain a solid understanding of the key principles of wireless and mobile networks:

• Radio fundamentals
• Mobile network components and operation
• Coverage, capacity and mobility
• Why cellular radio systems are used
• Registration and handoffs
• Digitized voice over radio for PSTN phone calls
• Mobile Internet: "Data Plan"
• Cellular technologies: FDMA, TDMA, CDMA, OFDM
• 4G LTE and OFDMA
• 5G: new spectrum, more b/s, ultra-broadband and IoT
• Wi-Fi: 802.11 wireless LANs, Wi-Fi 6 / 802.11ax
• GEO and LEO satellite communications

Jargon & Buzzwords • VoIP Phone System Components and Operation • Voice Packetization • LANs and WANs • VoIP Phones: MAC Address, DHCP, IP, UDP, RTP, QoS • SIP, Softswitches & SIP Trunking • Cloud • The Future

Fundamentals of Voice over IP is a complete introduction to everything Voice over IP. You'll learn the fundamental ideas and principles of a VoIP telephone system, VoIP, SIP & all the other jargon - what it actually means and how it all works together.

At each step, we'll also cover supporting and related technologies like Ethernet MAC frames and codecs and video over IP.

The objective of this course is to put in place a solid, structured base of knowledge in the technology and implementation of communicating thoughts from one person's brain to another via a telephone conversation carried in IP packets.

In particular, on completion of this course, you will be able to explain:

• How a VoIP phone is more of a computer than a phone, and its computer functions
• How a VoIP phone digitizes the speech coming into a microphone
• The idea of adding a time stamp to a 20 ms segment of digitized speech 
• How UDP adds a port number and error check
• IP adds the called party's telephone's IP address and creates an IP packet
• This is carried in a MAC frame over a physical circuit to the next router
• Reconstructing the speech at the far end
• What happens when packets with voice get delayed or lost
• That SIP is the protocol for exchanging little text messages to start a phone call
• What a video server is made of, where it is located, and what it does
• What a gateway is and why it is needed
• Wiring VoIP phones to Layer 2 aggregation and PoE switches in wiring closets
• VoIP carrier services, including SIP trunking, MPLS VPN, Internet SD-WAN
• What a Service Level Agreement is
• How basic telecom service will be Broadband IP Dial Tone in the future, as the Internet and the telephone network become the same thing.

One cornerstone of a full, rounded base of knowledge of telecommunications is the structure and operation of the Public Switched Telephone Network, built over the past 135 years, still in operation in every country on earth – knowledge necessary for connecting the PSTN to, and steadily replacing the PSTN with IP telecom technologies.

In this course, you'll build a solid understanding of the fundamentals of the telephone system: Customer Premise and Central Office, loops, trunks, remotes, circuit switching and how a telephone call is connected end-to-end. We'll cover LECs, CLECs and IXCs, sound, analog and the voiceband, twisted pair, DTMF and SS7. Updated for the 2020s.

On completion of this course, you will be able to draw a model of the Public Switched Telephone Network, identify and explain its components and technologies including:

• Loops and trunks, CO, telephone switches and circuit-switching
• Twisted pair, the outside plant, remotes, fiber to the neighborhood
• The founding, breakup and re-emergence of AT&T in the US; Bell & TELUS in Canada
• LECs, IXCs and CLECs
• Plain Ordinary Telephone Service (POTS):
• Analog, the voiceband, how it relates to copper wires, electricity, circuits and sound
• Supervision, dial tone, ringing, lightning protection, tip and ring, -48 volts
• Touch-tone and DTMF
• Basics of SS7 and call routing

 

The second half of CTNS is four courses on networking, delivering a practical understanding of Ethernet and its MAC frames, IP packets with IP addresses and routers, and the traffic management system MPLS. We begin with the OSI Reference Model and its Layers as a framework to organize the discussions.

Protocols & Standards   •  OSI Model   •  Layers   •  Protocol Stacks   •  How Protocol Stacks Work

This course establishes a framework for all of the subsequent discussions: the OSI 7-Layer Reference Model, which identifies and divides the functions to be performed into groups called layers.

This framework is required to sort out the many functions that need to be performed, and to be able to discuss separate issues separately.

First, we'll define the term "protocol" and compare that to a standard. Then we'll define "layer" and how a layered architecture operates, and provide an overview of the name, purpose and function of each of the seven layers in the OSI model.

Then, we'll go back through the story more slowly, with one lesson for each of the layers, examining in greater detail the functions that have to be performed and giving examples of protocols and how and where they are used to implement particular layers.

The result is a protocol stack, one protocol on top of another on top of another to fulfill all of the required functions. To make this more understandable, this course ends with the famous FedEx Analogy illustrating the concepts using company-to-company communications, and an analogy of Babushka dolls to illustrate how the protocol headers are nested at the bits level.

On completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Define a protocol and differentiate that from a standard
• Explain why a layered architecture is required
• List the seven layers of the OSI model, the name, purpose and functions of each
• Explain how the layers relate to each other
• Explain how a protocol stack operates and protocol headers.

This course is all about Ethernet: the fundamentals, equipment and implementations including twisted-pair copper cables, wireless and fiber, in-building, in the network core, MANs and PONs.

You'll understand the jargon and buzzwords, the underlying ideas, and how it all works together to form the physical basis of the telecom network.

On completion of this course, you will be able to explain:

• The idea of a broadcast domain.
• The idea of a MAC addresses to identify a LAN interface on a station in a broadcast domain.
• What MAC frames are, and what purpose they serve.
• What a LAN switch is, and what it does.
• How VLANs can be used to segregate devices into different broadcast domains. 
• The IEEE 802 series of standards
• The 802.3 standard and communicating MAC frames at 10 Mb/s on coaxial cables to Gigabit Ethernet on copper and fiber.
• What the code 1000BASE-T means.
• MAC frames over the Ether, a.k.a. Wi-Fi, the 2.4 and 5 GHz unlicensed bands, and the fundamentals of how the bits in MAC frames are communicated using radio carrier frequencies.
• Wiring Ethernet to the work area with Cat 5, Cat 5e and Cat 6 twisted-pair copper-wire cables.
• Wiring closets and Layer 2 aggregation switches.
• What Optical Ethernet is, and how it is the building block of telecom networks, including Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), carrier MPLS networks, and Passive Optical Networks (PONs) for fiber to the home.
• The fundamentals of how the bits in MAC frames are communicated using light guided in glass tubes.
• How fiber cables are deployed and connected to equipment at each end. What designations like 100GBASE-ER4 mean.

Course 2213 IP Networks, Routers and Addresses

This is a comprehensive course on IP addresses, routers and packets. Referring to the OSI Layers, this course could also be called Layer 3. We begin with the two basic principles of packet networks: bandwidth on demand, also known as overbooking or statistical multiplexing; and packet-switching, also known as packet forwarding or routing.
We'll understand what routers do and where they are located, routing tables and the basic operation of a router and the standard strategy deploying an edge router between the LANs and the WAN at each location.
Then we'll cover IP version 4: address classes and how they are assigned to Regional Internet Registries then ISPs then end-users, dotted-decimal notation, static addresses, dynamic addresses and DHCP, public addresses, private addresses and NAT.
The course concludes with IPv6: the IPv6 packet and changes from IPv4, IPv6 address allocations and assignments and end up understanding how IPv6 subnets will be assigned to broadcast domains and 18 billion billion addresses per residence.

On completion of this course, you will be able to explain:

• What a packet is
• What a router is
• Overbooking and bandwidth on demand
• Why and how it can be implemented
• What a network is, what a private network is
• How routers implement a network by connecting links
• How routers move packets between broadcast domains
• Basic network design and security: packet filtering
• The basic structure and contents of a routing table
• The Customer Edge
• IPv4 address blocks: Class A, Class B and Class C
• Dotted-decimal notation
• Static addresses and dynamic addresses
• DHCP and how and why it is used to assign both
• Public addresses and private addresses
• How, why and where each is used
• NAT: Network Address Translation
• IPv6
• How IPv6 addresses are allocated to ISPs
• How each residence gets 18 billion billion IPv6 addresses