What you will learn:
You'll learn how copper, fibre, and hybrid technologies are deployed to deliver broadband and telephony services to residential and business customers, understand the different access architectures from copper-based broadband through to full fibre (FTTP), and gain an awareness of the health and safety considerations relevant to working in the access network environment.
By the end of this course you will be able to:
- describe the benefits, capabilities, and applications of digital communications with reference to the various methods of providing broadband connections.
- describe the possible impact of loss of a service for customers and service providers with reference to service level agreements and regulator stipulated compensation schemes.
- explain the relationship between, and the significance of, the terms “bits”, “bit rate” and “bandwidth”.
- describe the role of government and national regulator in the provision of universal coverage of broadband services.
- describe how the access network has evolved to provide broadband services as well as telephony and how all telephony services will ultimately be provided over broadband connections.
- describe and compare the roles, capabilities, routing and connection of the various types of cable used in the access network and in customer premises.
- describe and compare the benefits and installation costs of providing copper, optical fibre and hybrid fibre/copper connections.
- describe the role of the various passive and active elements in the access network that provide copper, fibre, and hybrid fibre based broadband and telephony services.
- describe the role of the various devices and cabling in home and business premises necessary for access to the various types of broadband service.
Course prerequisites:
This course does not assume any prior knowledge of telecommunications. Study of Physics or Combined Sciences at secondary (high) school level would be an advantage.
Approximate study time: 5 hours
Delivery platform requirements:
To access the course, a computer/tablet running a browser such as Chrome, Safari, Edge etc. is required. The device should have an active Internet connection and a screen resolution of at least 1024x768.