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GLOSSARY

IANA - INTERNET ASSIGNED NUMBERS AUTHORITY
ICANN - INTERNET CORPORATION for ASSIGNED NAMES and NUMBERS
ICMP - INTERNET CONTROL MESSAGE PROTOCOL
iDEN - INTEGRATED DIGITAL ENHANSED NETWORK
IETF - INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE
ILEC - INCUMDENT LOCAL EXCHANGE CARRIER
IGP - INTERIOR GATEWAY PROTOCOL
INTERNET
IAP - INTERNET ACCESS PROVIDER
IE -INTERNET EXPLORER
IP - INTERNET PROTOCOL
ISP - INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER
INTERNETWORKING
INTRANET
IP TELEPHONY
IPsec - INTERNET PROTOCOL SECURITY
IPv6 - INTERNET PROTOCOL VERSION 6
IPX - INTERNETWORK PACKET EXCHANGE
ISDN - INTEGRATED SERVICES DIGITAL NETWORK
IXC - INTEREXCHANGE CARRIER


• IANA, Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, is the organization under the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) of the Internet Society that, under a contract from the U.S. government, has overseen the allocation of Internet Protocol addresses to Internet service providers (ISPs). IANA also has had responsibility for the registry for any "unique parameters and protocol values" for Internet operation. These include port numbers, character sets, and MIME media access types.
  Partly because the Internet is now a global network, the U.S. government has withdrawn its oversight of the Internet, previously contracted out to IANA, and lent its support to a newly-formed organization with global, non-government representation, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN has now assumed responsibility for the tasks formerly performed by IANA.
  

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• ICANN, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the private (non-government) non-profit corporation with responsibility for IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions, the services previously performed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). (ICANN is usually pronounced EYE-can, as in "I can at least try to manage the Internet.")
  Initial members of the ICANN board were chosen by the late Dr. Jonathon Postel, who headed IANA. IANA derived its authority under a contract from the U.S. government which financed the original research network, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, from which the Internet grew. The need to internationalize the governing of the Internet (among other concerns) led the U.S. government to recommend the origin of ICANN as a global, government-independent entity to manage the systems and protocols that keep the Internet going. The U.S. government is essentially turning over control of the Internet to ICANN although domain name registration performed by Network Solutions, Inc. will continue to be under U.S. government contract for a limited time.
  

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• ICMP, Internet Control Message Protocol, is a message control and error-reporting protocol between a host server and a gateway to the Internet. ICMP uses Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams, but the messages are processed by the IP software and are not directly apparent to the application user.
  

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• iDEN, Integrated Digital Enhanced Network, is a wireless technology from Motorola combining the capabilities of a digital cellular telephone , two-way radio, alphanumeric pager , and data/fax modem in a single network. iDEN operates in the 800 MHz , 900MHz, and 1.5 GHz bands and is based on time division multiple access (TDMA) and GSM architecture. It uses Motorola's Vector Sum Excited Linear Predictors (VSELP) vocoder for voice compression and QAM modulation to deliver 64 Kbps over a 25 KHz channel.
  

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• IETF, Internet Engineering Task Force, is the body that defines standard Internet operating protocols such as TCP/IP .
  

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• ILEC, Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, is a telephone company in the U.S. that was providing local service when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted. ILECs include the former Bell operating companies (BOCs) which were grouped into holding companies known collectively as the regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs) when the Bell System was broken up by a 1983 consent decree. ILECs are in contradistinction to CLEC (competitive local exchange carriers). A "local exchange" is the local "central office" of an LEC. Lines from homes and businesses terminate at a local exchange. Local exchanges connect to other local exchanges within a local access and transport area (LATA) or to interexchange carriers (IXC) such as long-distance carriers AT&T, MCI, and Sprint.
  

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• IGP, Interior Gateway Protocol, is a protocol for exchanging routing information between gateways (hosts with routers) within an autonomous network (for example, a system of corporate local area networks). The routing information can then be used by the Internet Protocol (IP) or other network protocols to specify how to route transmissions. There are two commonly used IGPs: the Routing Information Protocol (RIP) and the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol.
  

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• INTERNET, sometimes called simply "the Net," is a worldwide system of computer networks - a network of networks in which users at any one computer can, if they have permission, get information from any other computer (and sometimes talk directly to users at other computers). It was conceived by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the U.S. government in 1969 and was first known as the ARPANET. The original aim was to create a network that would allow users of a research computer at one university to be able to "talk to" research computers at other universities. A side benefit of ARPANet's design was that, because messages could be routed or rerouted in more than one direction, the network could continue to function even if parts of it were destroyed in the event of a military attack or other disaster.
  Today, the Internet is a public, cooperative, and self-sustaining facility accessible to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Physically, the Internet uses a portion of the total resources of the currently existing public telecommunication networks. Technically, what distinguishes the Internet is its use of a set of protocols called TCP/IP (for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Two recent adaptations of Internet technology, the intranet and the extranet, also make use of the TCP/IP protocol.
  For many Internet users, electronic mail (e-mail) has practically replaced the Postal Service for short written transactions. Electronic mail is the most widely used application on the Net. You can also carry on live "conversations" with other computer users, using Internet Relay Chat (IRC). More recently, Internet telephony hardware and software allows real-time voice conversations.
  The most widely used part of the Internet is the World Wide Web (often abbreviated "WWW" or called "the Web"). Its outstanding feature is hypertext, a method of instant cross-referencing. In most Web sites, certain words or phrases appear in text of a different color than the rest; often this text is also underlined. When you select one of these words or phrases, you will be transferred to the site or page that is relevant to this word or phrase. Sometimes there are buttons, images, or portions of images that are "clickable." If you move the pointer over a spot on a Web site and the pointer changes into a hand, this indicates that you can click and be transferred to another site.
  

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• IAP, Internet Access Provider, is a company that provides individuals and other ISP companies access to the Internet. An IAP is a type of Internet service provider (ISP). (The other main service that an ISP provides is Web site building and virtual hosting.) An IAP has the equipment and the telecommunication line access required to have POP on the Internet for the geographic area served. The larger IAPs have their own high-speed leased lines so that they are less dependent on the telecommunication providers and can provide better service to their customers. Among the largest national and regional ISPs are AT&T WorldNet, IBM Global Network, MCI, Netcom, UUNet, and PSINet.
  

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• IE Internet Explorer, (MSIE) is the most widely used World Wide Web browser. It comes with the Microsoft Windows operating system and can also be downloaded from Microsoft'w Web site. The MSIE browser competes with an earlier browser, Netscape Navigator. Three other browsers are Mosaic (the browser on which Netscape's browser was based), Lynx, and Opera.
  

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• ,Internet Protocol, is the method or protocol by which data is sent from one computer to another on the Internet. Each computer (known as a host) on the Internet has at least one IP address that uniquely identifies it from all other computers on the Internet. When you send or receive data (for example, an e-mail note or a Web page), the message gets divided into little chunks called packets. Each of these packets contains both the sender's Internet address and the receiver's address. Any packet is sent first to a gateway computer that understands a small part of the Internet. The gateway computer reads the destination address and forwards the packet to an adjacent gateway that in turn reads the destination address and so forth across the Internet until one gateway recognizes the packet as belonging to a computer within its immediate neighborhood or domain. That gateway then forwards the packet directly to the computer whose address is specified.
  Because a message is divided into a number of packets, each packet can, if necessary, be sent by a different route across the Internet. Packets can arrive in a different order than the order they were sent in. The Internet Protocol just delivers them. It's up to another protocol, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to put them back in the right order.
  IP is a connectionless protocol, which means that there is no continuing connection between the end points that are communicating. Each packet that travels through the Internet is treated as an independent unit of data without any relation to any other unit of data. (The reason the packets do get put in the right order is because of TCP, the connection-oriented protocol that keeps track of the packet sequence in a message.) In the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) communication model, IP is in layer 3, the Networking Layer.
  The most widely used version of IP today is Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4). However, IP Version 6 (IPv6) is also beginning to be supported. IPv6 provides for much longer addresses and therefore for the possibility of many more Internet users. IPv6 includes the capabilities of IPv4 and any server that can support IPv6 packets can also support IPv4 packets.
  

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• ISP, Internet Service Provider, is a company that provides individuals and other companies access to the Internet and other related services such as Web site building and virtual hosting. An ISP has the equipment and the telecommunication line access required to have a point-of-presence on the Internet for the geographic area served. The larger ISPs have their own high-speed leased lines so that they are less dependent on the telecommunication providers and can provide better service to their customers. Among the largest national and regional ISPs are AT&T WorldNet, IBM Global Network, MCI, Netcom, UUNet, and PSINet.
  

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• INTERNETWORKING is a term used by Cisco, BBN, and other providers of network products and services as a comprehensive term for all the concepts, technologies, and generic devices that allow people and their computers to communicate across different kinds of networks. For example, someone at a computer on a token ring local area network may want to communicate with someone at a computer on an Ethernet local area network in another country using a Wide Area Network interconnection. The common internetwork protocols, routing tables, and related network devices required to achieve this communication constitute internetworking.
  

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• INTRANET is a private network that is contained within an enterprise. It may consist of many interlinked local area networks and also use leased lines in the Wide Area Network. Typically, an intranet includes connections through one or more gateway computers to the outside Internet. The main purpose of an intranet is to share company information and computing resources among employees.
  An intranet can also be used to facilitate working in groups and for teleconferences. An intranet uses TCP/IP, HTTP, and other Internet protocols and in general looks like a private version of the Internet. With tunneling, companies can send private messages through the public network, using the public network with special encryption/decryption and other security safeguards to connect one part of their intranet to another.
  

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• IP TELEPHONY Internet Protocol Telephony is a general term for the technologies that use the Internet Protocol's packet-switched connections to exchange voice, fax, and other forms of information that have traditionally been carried over the dedicated circuit-switched connections of the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Using the Internet, calls travel as packets of data on shared lines, avoiding the tolls of the PSTN. The challenge in IP telephony is to deliver the voice, fax, or video packets in a dependable flow to the user. Much of IP telephony focuses on that challenge.
  

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• IPsec Internet Protocol Security is a developing standard for security at the network or packet processing layer of network communication. Earlier security approaches have inserted security at the application layer of the communications model. IPsec will be especially useful for implementing virtual private networks and for remote user access through dial-up connection to private networks. A big advantage of IPsec is that security arrangements can be handled without requiring changes to individual user computers. Cisco has been a leader in proposing IPsec as a standard (or combination of standards and technologies) and has included support for it in its network routers.
  

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• IPv6 Internet Protocol Version 6 is the latest level of the Internet Protocol (IP) and is now included as part of IP support in many products including the major computer operating systems. IPv6 has also been called "IPng" (IP Next Generation). Formally, IPv6 is a set of specifications from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). IPv6 was designed as an evolutionary set of improvements to the current IP Version 4. Network hosts and intermediate nodes with either IPv4 or IPv6 can handle packets formatted for either level of the Internet Protocol. Users and service providers can update to IPv6 independently without having to coordinate with each other. The most obvious improvement in IPv6 over the IPv4 is that IP addresses are lengthened from 32 bits to 128 bits. This extension anticipates considerable future growth of the Internet and provides relief for what was perceived as an impending shortage of network addresses.
  

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• IPX Internetwork Packet Exchange is a networking protocol from Novell that interconnects networks that use Novell's NetWare clients and servers. IPX is a datagram or packet protocol. IPX works at the Network layer of communication protocols and is connectionless (that is, it doesn't require that a connection be maintained during an exchange of packets as, for example, a regular voice phone call does).
  

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• ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network is a set of CCITT/ITU standards for digital transmission over ordinary telephone copper wire as well as over other media. Home and business users who install an ISDN adapter (in place of a modem) can see highly-graphic Web pages arriving very quickly (up to 128 Kbps). ISDN requires adapters at both ends of the transmission so your access provider also needs an ISDN adapter. ISDN is generally available from your phone company in most urban areas in the United States and Europe.
  There are two levels of service: the Basic Rate Interface (BRI), intended for the home and small enterprise, and the Primary Rate Interface (PRI), for larger users. Both rates include a number of B-channels and a D-channels. Each B-channel carries data, voice, and other services. Each D-channel carries control and signaling information.
  The Basic Rate Interface consists of two 64 Kbps B-channels and one 16 Kbps D- channel. Thus, a Basic Rate user can have up to 128 Kbps service. The Primary Rate consists of 23 B-channels and one 64 Kpbs D-channel in the United States or 30 B-channels and 1 D-channel in Europe.
  

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• IXC Interexchange Carrier is a telephone company that provides connections between local exchanges in different geographic areas. IXCs provide interLATA service as described in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. They're commonly referred to as "long-distance carriers." IXCs include AT&T, MCI, Sprint, and others.
  

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