Communication equipment is hardware that is designed to transmit data, instructions and information between a sending device and a receiving device. A good example of communication equipment that connects a communications channel to a sending or receiving device is a computer is a modem.
Computers process data as digital signals. Data, instructions, and information travel along a communications channel in either analogue or digital form, depending on the communications channel. An analogue signal consists of a continuous electrical wave. A digital signal consists of individual electrical pulses that represent bits grouped together into bytes.
For communications channels that use digital signals (such as cable television lines), the modem transfers the digital signals between the computer and the communications channel. If a communications channel uses analogue signals (such as some telephone lines), however, the modem first converts between analogue and digital signals.
Below are some of the most common communication equipment: