Degradation (telecommunications)

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In telecommunication, degradation, which may be categorized as either "graceful" or "catastrophic", has the following meanings:

1. The deterioration in quality, level, or standard of performance of a functional unit.
2. In communications, a condition in which one or more of the required performance parameters fall outside predetermined limits, resulting in a lower quality of service.

There are several forms and causes of degradation in electric signals, both in the time domain and in the physical domain, including runt pulse, spike, jitter, wander, swim, drift, glitch, ringing, crosstalk, antenna effect (not the same antenna effect as in IC manufacturing), and phase noise.