Telecommunication technologies may primarily be divided into wired and wireless methods. Overall though, a basic telecommunication system consists of three main parts that are always present in some form or another:

A transmitter that takes information and converts it to a signal.

A transmission medium also called the physical channel that carries the signal. An example of this is the "free space channel".

A receiver that takes the signal from the channel and converts it back into usable information for the recipient.

For example, in a radio broadcasting station, the station's large power amplifier is the transmitter; and the broadcasting antenna is the interface between the power amplifier and the "free space channel". The free space channel is the transmission medium, and the receiver's antenna is the interface between the free space channel and the receiver. Next, the radio receiver is the destination of the radio signal, and this is where it is converted from electricity to sound for people to listen to.

Sometimes, telecommunication systems are "duplex" (two-way systems) with a single box of electronics working as both the transmitter and a receiver, or a transceiver. For example, a cellular telephone is a transceiver.^[36] The transmission electronics and the receiver electronics within a transceiver are actually quite independent of each other. This can be readily explained by the fact that radio transmitters contain power amplifiers that operate with electrical powers measured in watts or kilowatts, but radio receivers deal with radio powers that are measured in the microwatts or nanowatts. Hence, transceivers have to be carefully designed and built to isolate their high-power circuitry and their low-power circuitry from each other, as to not cause interference.

Telecommunication over fixed lines is called point-to-point communication because it is between one transmitter and one receiver. Telecommunication through radio broadcasts is called broadcast communication because it is between one powerful transmitter and numerous low-power but sensitive radio receivers.^[36]

Telecommunications in which multiple transmitters and multiple receivers have been designed to cooperate and to share the same physical channel are called multiplex systems. The sharing of physical channels using multiplexing often gives very large reductions in costs. Multiplexed systems are laid out in telecommunication networks, and the multiplexed signals are switched at nodes through to the correct destination terminal receiver.