Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network
In the 1980s the telecommunications industry expected that digital services would follow much the same pattern as voice services did on the public switched telephone network, and conceived a grandiose end-to-end circuit switched services, known as Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN). This was designed in the 1990s as a logical extension of the end-to-end circuit switched data service, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN).
Before B-ISDN, the original ISDN attempted to substitute the analog telephone system with a digital ISDN system which was appropriate for both voice and non voice traffic. Obtaining worldwide agreement on the Basic rate interface standard was expected to lead to a large user demand for ISDN equipment, hence leading to mass production and inexpensive ISDN chips. However, the standardization process took years and the technology in this area moved rapidly and, once the standard was finally agreed upon became obsolete.
For home use the largest demand for new services was video and voice transfer, but the ISDN basic rate lacks the necessary channel capacity. For business, ISDN's 64 kbps data rate compared unfavorably to 10 mbps LANs. This led to introduction of B-ISDN. Services included video telephone and video conferencing.
The designated technology for B-ISDN was Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), which was intended to carry both synchronous voice and asynchronous data services on the same transport.
The B-ISDN vision has been overtaken by the disruptive technology of the Internet. The ATM technology survives as a low-level layer in most Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technologies, and as a payload type in some wireless technologies such as WiMAX.
See also
- Dynamic synchronous transfer mode, a revival of circuit switching technology for broadband traffic
External links
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