Georgia Telecom - terms for commercial and residential voice and data cable installation

Here we have defined some of the commonly used networking and telecommunications terms:

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM): A high-speed networking standard that uses switches to establish point-to-point connections. ATM performance is expressed as Optical Carrier levels, written as "OC-xxx." 10 Gbps (OC-192) data rates are technically feasible with ATM, but more commonly used rates are 155 Mbps (OC-3) and 622 Mbps (OC-12).
Baseband: Transmission method that uses the entire bandwidth of the cable for one digital signal. Baseband is cheaper and less sophisticated than its relative, Broadband.
Broadband: Transmission method that has enough bandwidth to carry multiple voice, video and/or data channels simultaneously. The channels are separated to ensure that they don't interfere with each other.