Business telecommunications and IT systems

Frequently Asked Questions.

Interference measured at the other end (the far end) of the circuit as the transmitter.

Abbeviated to FEXT.

see CrossTalk.

Federation Against Software Theft.

A powerful world-wide organisation, set up in 1984 by the British Computer Society, to prevent use of unlicenced software.

A 100Mbit/s technology based on the 10base-T Ethernet CSMA/CD network access method.

A term used to describe a generic mode of packet switching in hardware at layers 1 or 2 of the OSI seven layer model, in order to achieve high speed and low delay across a network.

A Frame Relay term. Frame Check Sequence.

Standard 16 bit CRC used for frame relay frames (and others).

The FCS detects bit errors occurring in the bits of the frame between the opening flag and the FCS.

Floppy Disk Drive. Usually for 3.5" floppy disks. Early PCs used 5.25" disks.

Fibre Distributed Data Interface.

A high speed LAN standard employing token passing on dual 100Mbit/s fibre optic rings, although the standard can now be run on lower cost UTP cable.

Frequency Division Multiplexing.

Originally used in telephony until replaced by Pulse Code Modulation.

A facility provided by BT, where a PSTN exchange line or ISDN channel is made to operate as if it was an extension of a telephone system.

Note that there is no CLI or CTI capability, and only operates on BT System X and System Y exchanges.

FeatureLine Local Link replaces the original BT Speech Line offerings.

A maximum of five sites can be cabled within the one local area, and placed in one Business Group.

A large variant of BT's FeatureLine, operating from BT DMS100 exchanges.

FeatureNet 1000 offers connection to telephone systems and telephones, whilst FeatureNet 5000 offers connection to telephones, only.

A version of FeatureNet.

A version of FeatureNet.

A Virtual Private Circuit (VPN) using BT's PSTN infrastructure, enabling the subscriber to enjoy company wide call discounts on BT’s PSTN call charges.

The PSTN line is either ceased and a Centrex Access Line set up, or if the subscriber is currently using FeatureLine, it is simply an upgrade.

FeatureNet works with most telephone systems, although Embark can work in the same way as FeatureLine. Predominantly linked with One Bill providing a simplified invoice process across the whole organisation.

A Frame Relay term. Forward Explicit Congestion Notification.

A bit sent by a frame relay network to notify a CPE that congestion has been encountered by traffic sent to the transmitting device and that congestion reduction procedures should be instigated.

Field Emission Display.

A technology which could replace LCD.

see Far End CrossTalk.

Fibre Channel, or FC, is a gigabit speed network technology primarily used for storage networking and sccredited by ANSI.

Fibre Channel was primarily used in the super computer field but has become the standard connection type for storage area networks (SAN) in enterprise storage.

Despite its name, Fibre Channel signaling can run on both twisted pair copper wire and fibre optic cables.

A cable made from glass threads.

Voice and/or data is converted into pulsed light which travels in the glass at approximately 0.7 times the speed of light.