Telecommunications and Three Letter Acronyms

Three Letter Acronyms or TLA’s are commonly used in our acronym happy industry.  TLA’s are bandied about on the assumption that everyone knows what they stand for and what they mean. I have chosen a very brief selection of commonly used TLA’s to try and demystify the jargon.

POTS: Plain Old Telephone Service – A basic service supplying single telephone lines with nothing fancy and no features

PSTN: Public Switched Telephone Network – PSTN refers to the local, long distance and international phone system which we use every day. In some countries it is only one Phone Company, in countries with competition, such as Australia, it refers to the entire interconnected collection of local, long distance and international phone companies

URL: Uniform Resource Locator – a URL is a unique name that is assigned a static IP address (which means it doesn’t change) making it easier to locate a particular company on the web

IAD: Integrated Access Device – an IAD is piece of equipment that allows voice, data and video information to be delivered over a single high capacity circuit eg Broadband. It is also able to combine multiple services i.e ISDN, Frame Relay, Internet Protocol & DSL (Digital Subscriber Line)

ISDN: Integrated Services Digital Network – ISDN is a set of international standards that allows access to voice, data and video over a single circuit from the customers’ premises to the network edge. ISDN has two standard interfaces: BRA (Basic Rate Access) which basically means two channels for information exchange and one channel for signaling and PRA (Primary Rate Access) which can support up to 30 channels with 1 channel for signalling and control purposes.

Elizabeth

• Cheap ISDN
• ISDN
• FAQ On Preselection
• Long Distance Calls
• Abbreviations used in Data and Voice services