Telecommunications equipment

Telecommunications equipment (also telecoms equipment or communications equipment) is a 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.^[1]^[2]

Types

Telecommunications equipment can be broadly broken down into the following categories:^[3]

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,^[4]microprocessors, memory chips, and telecommunication circuits.^[5] As of 2005, telecommunications equipment account for 16.5% of the annual microprocessor market.^[6]

Vendors

The world's largest telecommunications equipment vendors by revenues in 2017 are:^[7]

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