Description:
Telecommunications Technologies for Small Businesses serves as a sort of cheat sheet for anyone shopping around for voice and (especially) data links for business applications. Frank Panzarino defines terms, explains concepts, and highlights the relative merits of different ways of getting signals from point A to point B. A lot of this is academic--rare is the business owner who needs to know about television scan rates in order to make a buying decision--but other aspects of his coverage, such as billing metrics for different kinds of networks, will prove valuable.A few of Panzarino's descriptions and explanations are inaccurate (a favorite: "Recently, there have been several attempts to standardize on suffixes such as .com, .net, .edu, etc., without much success") and more than a few tread the narrow line between concise and oversimplified, particularly when they have to do with applications of telecommunications links (such as Internet connectivity). Still, his definitions of terms and explanations of concepts are generally broadly accurate, and Panzarino's expertise in the design and marketing of telecommunications products overshadows his relative inexperience with Internet applications. The reader is left wishing for a second edition of this book in which the simple, scattershot coverage of random details--do we really need a picture of the Energy Star logo, or a section on what a data projector does?--is cut out, and the enlightening explanations of telecoms are given more space. --David Wall Topics covered: Lots of stuff, including everything from basic electric circuit theory and the history of telephone service to broadband data channels and virtual private networks (VPNs). Coverage is oriented more toward defining terms and explaining concepts; highly technical details get left for other resources.
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