History
The purpose of carrier systems is to save money by carrying more traffic on less infrastructure. 19th century telephone systems, operating at baseband, could only carry one telephone call on each wire, hence routes with heavy traffic needed many wires.
In the 1920s, frequency-division multiplexing could carry several circuits on the same balanced wires, and by the 1930s L-carrier and similar systems carried hundreds of calls at a time on coaxial cables.
Capacity of these systems increased in the middle of the century, while in the 1950s researchers began to take seriously the possibility of saving money on the terminal equipment by using time-division multiplexing. This work led to T-carrier and similar digital systems for local use.
Due to the shorter repeater spacings required by digital systems, long-distance still used FDM until the late 1970s when optical fiber was improved to the point that digital connections became the cheapest ones for all distances, short and long.
Read more about this topic: Carrier System
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)