The Telecommunications thread prepares students to effectively understand how to engineer and optimize communication systems that support the ever-increasing data flows critical to our daily lives. This thread focuses on the communication engineering principles and technologies that form the backbone of the information age, from data storage to data transmission, from wireless to optics. The thread develops the mathematical and engineering principles that enable the design of interconnected systems, from the physical medium where information is encoded, to the network level where protocols are designed, using tools from applied probability to signal processing.

Sample of related career paths:

• Mobile Communications, 5G/6G (AT&T, Verizon, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc.)
• Satellite Communications (Intelsat, Iridium, Viasat, NASA, etc.)
• Wifi (Broadcom, Netgear, Nest Wifi, Linksys, etc.)
• Wireless sensor networks (Siemens AG, ST Microelectronics, Emerson Electric Co, etc.)
• Cable replacement wireless, e.g., Bluetooth (Broadcom, Cypress Semiconductor, Marvell, etc.)
• Autonomous vehicles (Ford Motor Company, Tesla, GM, BMW, etc.)
• GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon.)
• Video-streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Google, etc.)
• Defense (DoD, GTRI, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc.)
• Networking (Cisco, Juniper, Netgear, Extreme, F5 Networks, etc.)
• Content-delivery networks - companies like Akamai, Limelight, Fastly, Cloudflare
• Network monitoring/WAN optimization- companies like Riverbed, Versa, Silverpeak, Cisco
• Server/Desktop virtualizationd - VMware, Citrix
• Video gaming companies - Electronic Arts (EA), Zynga, Ubisoft
• Internet of Things - Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Hitachi, Honeywell