The case for circuit switching in future wide bandwidth networks

Abstract

The author's basic premise is that at some point in the future all the transmission facilities of the public (telephone) network will be fiber-optic. With the advent of coherent transmission systems the available bandwidth will become enormous, and thus the question he addresses is: Given the availability of 'infinite' bandwidth to every subscriber, what does this imply for the network architecture? In particular, which transport technique is best suited to providing all foreseeable voice, data and video services? He discusses advantages and disadvantages of architectures based on different switching techniques and presents the case for an architecture based on circuit-switched, fixed-bandwidth channels for the transport of user information. The standard channel capacity should be determined by the service having the greatest bandwidth requirement.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>