Telecom

tw telecom wins State of Texas IP service contract

Tw telecom ( Nasdaq: TWTC ) struck yet another coup in the state & local government sector by winning a five-year contract with the State of Texas. Under the terms of contract, tw telecom will supply its suite of Ethernet, converged and VPN solutions to all of Texas' state agencies and departments.

These agencies and departments will be able to purchase these services that fit within the constraints of their already tight budgets.

Having built out fiber network infrastructure throughout Texas as well as providing services for the state government, Texas has been an ongoing growth market for tw telecom.

Those network bets are paying off. Over the past year, the service provider has secured contracts with a host of large business, government and even carrier customers including Gehan Homes, the Army at its Fort Bliss station in El Paso, and data center provider Core NAP.

A beginner's guide to telecom jargon, part 4 | Wireless - CNET News

This week, I continue with the techno-babble trend with a few more network terms for 4G. (Who doesn't love those?)

So for some light reading, here are a few terms telecom experts throw around with the assumption that everyone understands them.

TD-LTE: Just when you thought there possibly couldn't be anymore 4G terms, Clearwire pops up and decides to switch to a technology that hasn't gotten a lot of attention in the past. The TD stands for time division, making an increasingly complex alphabet soup of a name--all for one network technology.

At the risk of complicating an already befuddling subject, there are currently two types of LTE. The one that Verizon has been bragging about is a flavor called frequency division multiplexing, or FD-LTE. The technology uses two different pieces of spectrum, which act like separate pipes, to send and receive data.

TD-LTE, as its name implies, cuts up the same piece of spectrum into different time slots to dynamically assign what piece of data gets sent and what gets received. The only risk is if the TD-LTE network gets loaded, there's a higher risk of interference.

The marketing folks at Verizon wisely chose to skip these details because, in reality, no one but a few engineers really care.

Clearwire was quick to establish some legitimacy for the technology, noting that China Mobile and its more than 600 million subscribers will be using the standard, as will Japan's Softbank. That gives the vendors a ton of reasons to look at this technology.

LTE-Advanced: Clearwire also touted the network as LTE-Advanced ready . So what's this mystery third standard? It's what LTE will eventually grow into, hopefully clearing up a lot the jargon. LTE-Advanced was one of the original standards that the International Telecommunications Union designated as true 4G, before broadening the definition to include the other flavors.

The ITU specified that LTE-Advanced would offer speeds of 100 megabits per second when the device is moving at high speeds, or roughly 10 times faster than Verizon's LTE network, and a 1-gigabit per second connection when stationary or moving slowly.

But if LTE-Advanced is considered 4G, what are the marketing executives at the telcos going to call their upgraded networks? 4.5G? 5G?

MVNO: An acronym for mobile virtual network operator. It's an uber-complicated title for a company that buys wireless capacity and service on a wholesale basis, and resells it to consumers. The most notable MVNO was Virgin Mobile, before Sprint Nextel scooped up the company to augment its own prepaid business.

Telecom Crash Course

Telecom for dummies

Telecom

The new McGraw-Hill telecom factbook

Telecom protocol finder, a comprehensive review of data- and telecommunications protocols and technologies for network managers and field service engineers