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Those looking for a little schooling in how telecommunications transformed from smoke signals and telegraphs to satellite phones and VoIP got it as this week when TMCnet answered the question, “What are Telecommunications?”

Telecommunications refers to the exchange of information across significant distances in order to communicate. In earlier days, telecommunications relied on the use of visual cues or audio messages. During the modern age of electricity, telecommunications took on another form of telegraphs, teleprinters and fiber optics; and, in today’s world, telecommunications refers to everything from mobile phones to satellite phones to VoIP.

While the Internet is the largest example of a telecommunications system, smaller systems include corporate and academic wide area networks; telephone networks; police and fire communications systems; taxicab dispatch networks; and groups of amateur radio operators.

For more on telecommunications, click here.

In other news, telecommunications provider Amdocs (News - Alert) recently shed some light on a survey that explores “customer Experience” charging. The survey, based on 64 interviews with IT and marketing executives from 32 service providers (SPs) from Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific (done between May and July 2011) highlights service providers intentions to introduce family and tiered data plans next year along with the recognition that they need tighter integration of their charging and policy management capabilities in order to do so.

Some statistics of the survey include the facts that: 83 percent of respondents say their marketing organizations are asking IT to enable innovative data price plans; over 90 percent say their companies are looking to create packages across lines of business, customer types and payment methods; 86 percent of providers plan to launch tiered pricing plans; 82 percent plan to launch single data plans for multiple devices (e.g. tablets, smartphones, etc.); and 67 percent plan to launch family plans.

To read more on the survey as well as some quotes from Amdocs representatives, click here.

Also this week, TMCnet shared what was discussed when TMC’s (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to sit down with Yossi Zohar, portfolio marketing director for Amdocs. Right now, according to Zohar, customers are using many channels when it comes to interactions with their customers, from the call center to Web services. Many are also relying on their retail channels.

More recently, however, there is the trend of social media.

“This is an area where service providers have not been focusing enough, in our opinion,” said Zohar.

“It’s Social CRM,” said Zohar, agreeing with Tehrani who asked about the term. “It’s broader social media. Customers interact with service providers and with each other through Twitter, Facebook (News - Alert) and so on. There’s a lot of knowledge out there, a lot of influence.”

Check back here next week for more on telecommunications.