What you need to know to survive, long term.

Interests between broadcasters and telecom people are blurring. Technical operations and design engineers in one field are increasingly required to deal with practices and techniques in the other. The problem is expectations and terminology differences aren't recognized until it's too late.

Take "Quality of Service." The telecom people specify a percentage of the time that the service is guaranteed to be available. The down time may be very, very small. But, if it occurs during a high-priced...