Basic Telephony Services
Public Telecommunications Services limited to two-way real-time voice transmission within all of Lebanon offered as a Fixed Telecommunications Service over a Self-operated Network. Basic Telephony Services are classified for licensing purposes as requiring a Public Fixed Network licence.

Backbone
Network that handles the major voice and data traffic of a country. It employs the highest-speed transmission paths in the network. The access networks are attached to the backbone to directly connect the end user.

Backhaul
A high-capacity line dedicated to the transport of aggregate communication signals from base stations to the core network (also ITU-R F.1399).

Bandwidth
The range of frequencies available to be occupied by signals. In analogue systems it is measured in terms of Hertz (Hz) and in digital systems in bits per second (bit/s). The higher the bandwidth, the greater the amount of information that can be transmitted in a given time.

Base station
A radio transmitter/receiver and antenna used in the mobile cellular network. It maintains communications with cellular telephones within a given cell and transfers mobile traffic to other base stations and the fixed telephone network.

Basic service
Refers to the provision and carriage of voice telephony service, though some definitions also include telex and telegraph services.

Best-efforts
A traffic delivery standard for which the network exerts its best efforts to ensure that the traffic is delivered, but provides no guarantee that all traffic will be delivered.

Bill and Keep
In contrast to CPNP, this term denotes an interconnection arrangement in which the carriers exchange traffic on a negotiated basis, generally without paying interconnection charges. Each carrier bills its own customers for the traffic and keeps the resulting revenue. Also known as “sender keeps all” interconnection.

Bit (binary digit)
A bit is the primary unit of electronic, digital data. Written in base-2 binary language as a “1” or a “0”.

Bit/s
Bits per second.
Measurement of the transmission speed of units of data (bits) over a network. Also kbit/s: kilobits (1000) per second; Mbit/s: megabits (1 000 000) per second; Gbit/s: gigabits (1 000 000 000) per second; and Tbit/s: terabits (1 000 000 000 000) per second.

Bit-stream access
A form of network unbundling. With bit-stream access, the incumbent maintains management control over the physical line. Unlike full unbundling and line sharing, access seekers can only supply the services that the incumbent designates.

Blog
Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is an online journal (or newsletter) that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption.

Bluetooth
A radio technology that enables the transmission of signals over short distances between mobile phones, computers and other devices. It is typically used to replace cable connections.

BPL
Broadband over power line.
A wireline technology that is able to use the current electricity networks for data and voice transmission.

Broadband
Broadband is defined, for the purposes of this report, as Internet access with a minimum capacity equal to or greater than 256 kbit/s in one or both directions. Fixed broadband is implemented through technologies such as digital subscriber line (DSL), cable modem, fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), Metro Ethernet, wireless local area networks (WLAN), etc. Mobile broadband is implemented through technologies such as wideband CDMA2000, CDMA2000 1xEVDO, HSDPA, etc.

Broadcast
A transmission from a single sender to all connected devices. See also Unicast and Multicast.

Browser
Application that retrieves WWW documents specified by URLs from an http server on the Internet. Displays the retrieved documents according to the hyptertext markup language (HTML).

BSS
Broadcasting satellite service.

BWA
Broadband wireless access.
Encompasses either mobile or fixed access technologies that provide connections at speeds higher than the primary rate (for example, 2 Mbit/s).

Byte
(1) A set of bits that represent a single character. A byte is composed of eight bits. (2) A bit string that is operated upon as a unit and the site of which is independent of redundancy or framing techniques.