| Word | Description |
| ACIF | Australian Communications Industry Forum. An industry self-regulation body that agrees on technical protocols and standards to protect the communal interest. See the ACIF web site http://www.acif.org.au |
| Active Server Pages (ASP) | A specification for generating web content as needed. ASP passes the dynamically created HTML to the browser to be displayed to the user. Microsoft created Active Server Pages to make it easier for developers to create dynamic web sites in a Windows environment. |
| ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) | Asymmetric DSL. This is a technology designed to give basic broadband performance over the copper lines that have been used traditionally for telephony. Speeds range from 256kbps to about 8mbps, with the higher speeds available only over short, good quality copper lines. In the interests of a product range that can be offered widely, Telstra arbitrarily caps the maximum speed of its ADSL to 1.5mbps. Various other ADSL providers offer speeds closer to the maximum performance that can be achieved on a given line. |
| ADSL2 | A marginally faster version of ADSL. The speed improvement is due to smarter chips being more adept at isolating signals from background noise that accumulates on a copper circuit. ADSL2 speeds reach 12mbps. |
| ADSL2+ | An enhancement to ADSL2 that uses a wider frequency range to achieve substantially faster speeds, but only over short distances (less than about 1.5 kms). ADSL2+ speeds reach 25mbps. It was ratified by ACIF for use on Telstra’s network in April 2005. |
| Anonymous File Transfer Protocol (FTP) | This allows users without accounts to download files from an FTP server by using the username 'anonymous'. |
| ASP (application service provider) | A service provider that offers hosting of applications and data off-site, which can be accessed via a network connection. Not to be confused with Active Server Pages (ASP), see below. |
| Attachment | A file attached to an email, usually in its original format; an efficient way to send word processor files across the Internet. |