Broadband ISDN (B-ISDN)

Author: CCa2z

Date: 15th October 2009

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 vision of 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, ISDN.

The technology for B-ISDN was going to be 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.


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