Telecommunications equipment

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Smartphones are one of the most popular telecoms equipment.

Telecommunications equipment (also telecoms equipment or communications equipment) is a type of hardware which is used for the purposes of telecommunications. Since the 1990s the boundary between telecoms equipment and IT hardware has become blurred as a result of the growth of the internet and its increasing role in the transfer of telecoms data.

Types

Telecommunications equipment can be broadly broken down into the following categories:

• Public switching equipment
  • Analogue switches
  • Digital switches
    • Voice over IP switches
    • Virtual reality (VR)
• Transmission equipment
  • Transmission lines
    • Optical fiber
    • Local loops
  • Base transceiver stations
  • Free-space optical communication
    • Laser communication in space
  • Multiplexers
  • Communications satellites
• Customer premises equipment (CPE)
  • Customer office terminal
  • Private switches
  • Local area networks (LANs)
  • Modems
  • Mobile phones
  • Landline telephones
  • Answering machines
  • Teleprinters
  • Fax machines
  • Pagers
  • Routers
  • Wireless devices

Semiconductors

Most of the essential elements of modern telecommunication are built from MOSFETs (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors), including mobile devices, transceivers, base station modules, routers, RF power amplifiers, microprocessors, memory chips, and telecommunication circuits. As of 2005, telecommunications equipment account for 16.5% of the annual microprocessor market.

Vendors

The world's largest telecommunications equipment vendors by revenues in 2017 are:

Largest vendors by 2017 revenue (billion US dollars)

Huawei	$92.55
Cisco Systems	$48.00
Ciena	$38.57
Nokia	$27.73
ECI Telecom	$24.16
NEC Corporation	$23.95
Qualcomm	$22.297
ZTE	$16.71
Corning	$10.12
Motorola Solutions	$6.38
Juniper Networks	$5.03

Largest by country (2017)

United States	$94.62
Japan	$62.52
Finland	$27.73
Sweden	$24.16

See also

• Networking hardware
• List of networking hardware vendors
• List of telephone switches
• Network equipment provider