Networking Essentials
Networking Essentials
Networking Essentials
These facilities are leased from a Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) and can be obtained in a variety of forms. They can be either analog or digital, either 1.544Mbps (DS-1) or 44.476Mbps (DS-3) and can deliver service either electrically or optically. They can be also subrated into fractional components, such as 9.6Kbps. NOTE: The terms DS-1 and DS-3 refer specifically to the CCITT specifications for transmission formats. These terms are often confused and incorrectly used interchangeably with the more familiar T-1 and T-3 terms. The "T" prefix denotes a physical transmission facility, and should only be used to describe the physical facilities. These circuits provide basic, dedicated bandwidth between two points.
The PSTN was the earliest example of traffic engineering to deliver Quality of Service guarantees. (See the work of A.K. Erlang for some history on this.) Note: there are also a number of large private telephone networks which are not linked to the PSTN, usually for military purposes. There are also private networks run by large companies which are linked to the PSTN only through limited gateways, like a large PABX system. PSTN (public switched telephone network) is the world's collection of interconnected voice-oriented public telephone networks, both commercial and government-owned. It's also referred to as the Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). It's the aggregation of circuit-switching telephone networks that has evolved from the days of Alexander Graham Bell ("Doctor Watson, come here!"). Today, it is almost entirely digital in technology except for the final link from the central (local) telephone office to the user. In relation to the Internet, the PSTN actually furnishes much of the Internet's long-distance infrastructure. Because Internet service providers ISPs pay the long-distance providers for access to their infrastructure and share the circuits among many users through packet-switching, Internet users avoid having to pay usage tolls to anyone other than their ISPs.
PSDN is an acronym for Public Switched Data Network, a publicly-available network supporting packet-switched data, separate from the PSTN. In the UK, this term refers only to PSS (Packet Switch Stream), an X.25-based packet-switched network, originally used to provide leased-line Internet connections. Although superficially similar to the PSDN, ISDN, ADSL, SDSL, VDSL are not examples of it. ISDN is a circuitswitched digital network, and DSL variants are packet-switched data services overlaid on the PSTN. This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml? title=Public_switched_data_network&action=edit).