telephony

Meaning "sound over distance," it refers to electronically transmitting the human voice. In the beginning, telephony dealt only with analog signals in the circuit-switched networks of the telephone companies. It later referred to a mix of analog and digital circuits, but still with the telephone industry. Starting in the 1990s, telephony began to embrace sending voice over IP (VoIP) networks, which is now deployed by common carriers, private enterprises and independent VoIP providers (see VoIP and IP telephony).

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(communications)

telephony - Communication, often two-way, of spoken information, by means of electrical signals carried by wires or radio waves. The term was used to indicate transmission of the voice, as distinguished from telegraphy (done in Morse code and usually called "continuous wave" or CW transmission), radio teletypewriter (RTTY) transmission (also called FSK for "Frequency Shift Keying", the modulation scheme used by such machines), and later, facimile.