Telecommunications Services

The provision of services inclusive of the transmission/reception and routing of information in a potentially interactive manner by any technological means. Telecommunications Services also means the provision of Infrastructure or elements thereof necessary for the provision of such services.  Telecommunications Services include specific service categories, including but not limited to Network and End-User Services, Telephony, Value-Added Telecommunications Services, and Telecommunications Services provided to the Public or Restricted groups of persons (Defined User Groups or Licence Areas/Service Territories). The provision of any Telecommunications Service in Lebanon comes under the jurisdiction of the TRA and is subject to a Licence.

TACS
Total access communication systems.

TCP
Transmission control protocol. A transport layer protocol that offers connection-oriented, reliable stream services between two hosts. This is the primary transport protocol used by TCP/IP applications.

TCP/IP
Transmission control protocol/ Internet protocol.
The suite of protocols that defines the Internet and enables information to be transmitted from one network to another.

TDCDMA
Time division – Code division multiple access.

TDMA
Time division multiple access.
This is a technology for shared medium (usually radio) networks. It allows several users to share the same frequency by dividing it into different time slots. The users transmit in rapid succession, one after the other, each using their own time slot. This allows multiple users to share the same transmission medium (e.g., radio frequency), whilst using only the part of its bandwidth they require.

TD-SCDMA
Time division synchronous codedivision multiple access.
A 3G mobile telecommunication standard, being pursued in China by the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT), Datang and Siemens AG, in an attempt to develop home-grown technology and not be “dependent on Western technology”. TD-SCDMA uses time division duplexing (TDD), in contrast to the frequency division duplexing (FDD) scheme used by W-CDMA.

Technology-neutral
A general term referring to rules that allow operators to adopt any technology standard for a particular service.

Teledensity
Number of fixed telephone lines per 100 inhabitants. See Penetration.

TISPAN
Telecoms and Internet converged services and protocols for advanced networks, developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).

Total teledensity
Sum of the number of fixed lines and mobile cellular subscribers per 100 inhabitants. See Penetration.

TPC
Transmit power control.
A technical mechanism used within some networking devices in order to prevent too much unwanted interference between different wireless networks.

Traffic exchange point
Traffic exchange points are used by operators to exchange traffic through peering directly between service networks rather than indirectly, via transit through their upstream providers.

Transcoding
Transcoding is the direct digital-todigital conversion of one encoding to another. This is usually done to incompatible or obsolete data in order to convert it into a more suitable format.

Transit
An arrangement for interconnection of ISP networks in which a consumer ISP pays for traffic to be routed through the network of a provider ISP, in contrast to peering, which involves interconnection among roughly equal-sized ISPs.

Triple play
A term referring to the bundling of fixed and/or mobile voice, video and broadband Internet access services.

True access gap
The shortfall between market-based regulatory measures and universal access.