Public Switched Telephone Network - History

History

The first telephones had no network but were in private use, wired together in pairs. Users who wanted to talk to different people had as many telephones as necessary for the purpose. A user who wished to speak whistled into the transmitter until the other party heard.

Soon, however, a bell was added for signalling, and then a switch hook, and telephones took advantage of the exchange principle already employed in telegraph networks. Each telephone was wired to a local telephone exchange, and the exchanges were wired together with trunks. Networks were connected in a hierarchical manner until they spanned cities, countries, continents and oceans. This was the beginning of the PSTN, though the term was unknown for many decades.

Automation introduced pulse dialing between the phone and the exchange, and then among exchanges, followed by more sophisticated address signaling including multi-frequency, culminating in the SS7 network that connected most exchanges by the end of the 20th century.

The growth of the PSTN meant that traffic engineering techniques needed to be deployed to deliver quality of service (QoS) guarantees for the users. The work of A.K. Erlang established the mathematical foundations of methods required to determine the capacity requirements and configuration of equipment and the number of personnel required to deliver a specific level of service.

In the 1970s the telecommunications industry began implementing packet switched network data services using the X.25 protocol transported over much of the end-to-end equipment as was already in use in the PSTN.

In the 1980s the industry began planning for digital services assuming they would follow much the same pattern as voice services, and conceived a vision of end-to-end circuit switched services, known as the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN). The B-ISDN vision has been overtaken by the disruptive technology of the Internet.

At the turn of the 21st century, the oldest parts of the telephone network still use analog technology for the last mile loop to the end user. Digital services have been increasingly rolled out to end users using services such as DSL, ISDN, FTTx and cable modem systems.

Several large private telephone networks 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 private branch exchange (PBX).