A local loop is the wired connection from the telephone company’s central office in a local area to its customer’s telephones. It was originally constructed for voice transmission only using analog transmission on a single voice channel. Today, your computer's modem makes the conversion between analog signals and digital signals. With Integrated Services Digital Network or Digital Subscriber Line, the local loop can carry digital signals directly and at a much higher bandwidth than they do for voice only.
The central office is an office in a local area which subscribers home and business lines are connected; it has equipment that can switch calls locally or to long distance carriers.
Local exchanges, a telephone exchange, are a telecommunications system used in the public switch telephone network. An exchange consists of electrical units, in older systems human operators, which combine telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital systems to provide telephone calls between subscribers. A telephone exchange is located in a central office, a building used to house the inside plant equipment for possibly several telephone exchanges.
POP or point of presence is an access point to the internet; internet service providers generally have multiple POPS. A point of presence is a physical location, either part of the facilities of a telecommunications provider that the ISP rents or a separate location from the telecommunications provider that stores servers, routers, ATM switches and digital/analog call aggregators.
Fixed Lines, or also known as landline telephones, are phones that use a solid medium telephone line (metal wire of fiber optic cables) for transmissions; fixed phones can be hard wired or cordless. Cordless or fixed wireless refers to the operation of wireless devices or systems in fixed locations such as homes. Fixed wireless devices usually derive their electrical power from the utility mains electricity.
Cellular Telephone voice components are connected to the telephone through cell sites. Cell sites are antennas that convert radio signals to electrical and optical ones; they then travel over the terrestrial network then to antennas near the receiving cell phone user or onto the Public Switch Telephone Network when dialing fixed telephones.
Cellular Telephone data components or mobile broadband technology lets users access the internet via radio waves emitted from a tower. Select providers use these to service the area within the towers limits.
Demarcation Point is located on the outside of a building in a grey/black box. It is the point where the telephone company’s wiring ends and your wiring begins; responsibility of maintenance for the telephone company ends and your responsibility starts. Contains a surge suppressor to help protect the wiring and connected equipment in your home from damage and allows you to temporarily disconnect your wiring from the telephone company's wiring for troubleshooting purposes.
Access Network is the part of a telecommunications network which connects subscribers to their immediate service provider. It is contrasted with the core network which connects local providers to each other.
Metro Networks is a network that interconnects users with computer resources in a geographic area or region larger than that covered by even a large local area network but smaller than the area covered by a wide area network. It is also used to mean the interconnection of several local area networks by bridging them with backbone lines. Regional Network is the kind of networks which make up the second level of the internet hierarchy. They are the transit networks which connect the stub networks to the backbone networks.
Broadcast television systems are encoding or formatting standards for the transmission and reception of terrestrial signals. There are three main analog systems in current use around the world: National Television System Committee (NTSC), Phase Alternating Line (PAL), and Sequential Color with Memory (SECAM).
Community Antenna also known as Cable TV (CATV) bring television programs to those millions of people throughout the world who are connected to a community antenna; cable TV will likely become a popular way to interact with the World Wide Web and other new forms of multimedia information and entertainment services.
Network access point (NAP) is one of several major Internet interconnection points that serve to tie all the Internet access providers together. The NAPs provide major switching facilities that serve the public in general. Using companies apply to use the NAP facilities and make their own intercompany peering arrangements. Much Internet traffic is handled without involving NAPs, using peering arrangements and interconnections within geographic regions.
An interface device is a hardware component or system of components that allows a human being to interact with a computer, a telephone system, or other electronic information system. The term is often encountered in the mobile communication industry where designers are challenged to build the proper combination of portability, capability, and ease of use into the interface device.
Regional Bell operating company (RBOC) is a term describing one of the U.S. regional telephone companies that were created as a result of the breakup of American Telephone and Telegraph Company by a U.S. Federal Court consent decree in December of 1983. The seven original regional Bell operating companies were Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, NYNEX, Pacific Bell, Southwestern Bell, and US WEST. Each of these companies owned at least two Bell operating companies.
Multiple system operators (MSO) are operators of multiple cable television systems. The majority of system operators run cable systems in more than one community and hence most of them are multiple system operators.
An ISP is a company that supplies Internet connectivity to home and business customers. ISPs support one or more forms of Internet access, ranging from traditional modem to DSL and cable modem broadband services to dedicated T1/T3 lines. More recently, wireless Internet service providers or WISPs have emerged that offer Internet access through wireless LAN or wireless broadband networks. In addition to basic connectivity, many ISPs also offer related Internet services like email, Web hosting and access to software tools.

Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service. The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.