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The telephone network you know

The Legacy Telephone Network

The telephone system that we use everyday is built on principles over 100 years old, so we can safely refer to it as a legacy. While parts of the telephone network are actually that old, the core of the network today is quite modern technically.

The telephone network is known by a few names. Most common is the PSTN for Public Switched Telephone Network (occasionally GSTN substituting General or Global). Many like to refer to it as POTS for Plain Old Telephone System or Service. Internationally telephone operators historically fell under a country's PTT for Public Telephone and Telegraph (and other similar).

Before we had the Internet, the PSTN was the only common worldwide means of communication (not including broadcast). It is a remarkable achievement of the 20th Century that that we all take for granted. As it has been modernized, the telephone network has become very effective at meeting design requirements that have made it highly reliable for connecting telephones anywhere in the world.

This network reliability, which is the strength of the telephone network, is now strangely becoming its weakness. There is no question that the telephone network is the best network to connect any two wired locations on the earth. The standard of reliability in the telephone industry is known as five 9's, which means the network must work 99.999% of the time.

By comparison, such reliability on any one circuit path within the Internet does not have nor need such reliability, because the Internet can quickly reroute over different links. The result is an Internet that is more economical to build and maintain, yet deliver remarkable results. The challenge for voice transmission in the Internet scenario is that there is no time available to redirect or retransmit voice data. Your browser screen (data) can always be completed 100%, but a voice connection may experience problems because of this network architecture.

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