The Growing Usage of Public Switched Telephone Network for Non-Voice Applications

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The Growing Usage of Public Switched Telephone Network for Non-Voice Applications

The US Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), is very possibly the largest distributed system in existence. Most telephone switching networks does the same basic thing as the PSTN by going by a simple procedure: It basically connects point A to point B. Even though this seems like a very simple thing to do it is not always the easiest. The US PSTN requires some of the most complex computing systems in existence. Software for each switch might have several million lines of code, even if it has not many features.

PSTN is the world's collection of the Interconnected voice-oriented public telephone networks. PSTN is both commercial and publicly owned. It is also said to be the plain old telephone service. It is the same thing as the telephone networks that came from the days of Alexander Graham Bell who started the whole telephone thing off. Now it is almost all digital in technology except the central telephone office which to the user

The PSDN has thousands of switches. Switches have lots of redundant hardware and a lot of self-checking and recovery software. For many decades, AT&T has expected its switches too not to go down for more than two hours in forty years. That is a failure rate of 5.7 x 10^-6.

In relation to the Internet, the PSTN actually helps a lot of the Internets long distance infrastructure. Because Internet service providers (ISP's) pay the long distance providers for access to their infrastructure and share the circuits among all the users, Internet users avoid having to pay usage charge to anyone other than their ISP's.

The PSTN is part of the fixed telecommunications network of KPN telecom for narrowband switched services. A general description of this type of network is provided.

For most of the history of telephone networks, direct conversation between two people and the voice telephone service was the only basic thing that the PSTN did. The 300-3400 Hz bandwidth makes it designed for that purpose. Still today voice transmitting is still the most common use of the PSTN but it is also used for several different things, which are called non-voice services .

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