Glossary - Huawei EchoLife HG556a Installation Manual And User's Manual

3.7 Glossary

ADSL
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line
ADSL is a technology for transmitting digital information at a high bandwidth on existing
phone lines to homes and businesses. Unlike regular dial-up phone service, ADSL
provides continuously-available, "always on" connection. ADSL is asymmetric in that it
uses most of the channel to transmit downstream to the user and only a small part to
receive information from the user. ADSL simultaneously accommodates analog (voice)
information on the same line. ADSL is generally offered at downstream data rates from
512 kbit/s to about 6 Mbit/s.
ADSL2+
Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line 2+
ADSL2plus doubles the bandwidth used for downstream data transmission, effectively
doubling the maximum downstream data rates, and achieving rates of 20 Mbit/s on phone
lines as long at 5,000 feet. ADSL2plus solutions will most commonly be multimode,
interoperating with ADSL and ADSL2, as well as with ADSL2plus chipsets.
Browser
A computer program that allows users to view information from the Internet. To use a
browser, you type in the URL of a website, and the browser then connects your computer
to the website, and shows the information there on your screen.
Client
On a local area network or the Internet, a computer that accesses shared network
resources provided by another computer (called a server).
DHCP
Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
DHCP is a client-server networking protocol. Most organizations use DHCP. A DHCP server
provides configuration parameters specific to the DHCP client host requesting, generally,
information required by the host to participate on the Internet network. DHCP also
provides a mechanism for allocation of IP addresses to hosts.
DNS
Domain Name System
A hierarchical way of tracking domain names and their addresses, devised in the
mid-1980s. The DNS database does not rely on one file or even one server, but rather is
distributed over several key computers across the Internet to prevent catastrophic failure
if one or a few computers go down. DNS is a TCP/IP service that belongs to the Application
layer of the OSI model.
Ethernet
A local area network (LAN) architecture developed by Xerox Corporation in cooperation
with DEC and Intel in 1976. Ethernet uses a bus or star topology and supports data
User Manual 34