Glossary of Terms

Backbone: An Internet Backbone is a series of main network connections composing the internet.

Burstable: Burstable speed describes a specific amount of data that is grouped together for transmission.

CGI: Common Gateway Interface. This is a specification that is used for web servers to interact with users.

DS-3: Digital Signal is the signal in the T3 carrier consisting of transmisison speeds of 44.736 Mbps.

DWDM:Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing.
DWDM works by combining and transmitting multiple signals simultaneously at different wavelengths on the same fiber. In effect, one fiber is transformed into multiple virtual fibers. So, if you were to multiplex eight OC-48 signals into one fiber, you would increase the carrying capacity of that fiber from 2.5 Gb/s to 20 Gb/s. Currently, because of DWDM, single fibers have been able to transmit data at speeds up to 400Gb/s.

Fiber Optic: A technology that uses glass or plastic threaded fibers to transmit data with much more bandwidth than metal cables.

GigaBit Ethernet: A version of ethernet that offers data transmission speeds of 1,000 megabits per second (1Gbps).

IMAP: A communications mechanism for mail clients to interact with mail servers, and manipulate mailboxes.

Megabit: When used in describing data transfer rates it refers to one million bits or Megabits per second (Mbps).

OC-3: An Optical Carrier used to specify the speed of fiber optic networks with speeds of 155.52 Mbps.

OC-12: An Optical Carrier used to specify the speed of fiber optic networks with speeds of 622.08 Mbps.

OC-192: An Optical Carrier used to specify the speed of fiber optic networks with speeds of 9.952 Gbps.

SSI: A type of HTML comment that directs the Web server to dynamically generate data for the Web page whenever it is requested.

SSL: A protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL works by using a public key to encrypt data that's transferred over the SSL connection. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers.

SONET: Short for Synchronous Optical Network, a standard for connecting fiber-optic transmission systems.

Subdomain: A subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain name for example your site is www.yourdomainname.com, a subdomain of your site will be subdomainname.yourdomainname.com