Thursday, February 10, 2011

The digital services carrier network

The new types of digital  lines  installed by the  carriers began to form a new physical carrier services network. The lines  did not  cross-connect or inter- sect with any of the  millions of circuit-switched lines  that are in place and continue to be installed by the  carriers. At the  carrier company’s facilities, newer types of fully digital  equipment terminated these digital  lines.

This new carrier services network was called the  digital services  carrier net- work. (It is also  known  as the  digital signal carrier network, or simply as the  DS.) This network used higher-bandwidth digital  lines  and operated with packet-switched protocols to network computer data. (For more  on proto-  cols,  which are simply  rules for using  the  network, see  Chapter 1.)



Soon thereafter, the  DS network was defined based on its fundamental unit of bandwidth, known  as the  channel. The smallest channel unit provided a bandwidth of 64 Kbps (64 thousand bits  per  second). This channel was called a DS0, pronounced “D–S–zero.” (Many computer gurus start counting with 0; it’s a binary thing.) DS0 became the  base unit of bandwidth from which other dedicated transports were defined. (In Chapter 7, I cover the  popular DS stan-  dards in detail.)

The DS network also  introduced to the  telecommunications vocabulary another term that characterizes most of the  transport mechanisms that are not  part of the  older circuit-switched network. Because the  lines  used by the  DS carriers were installed between private customer locations and the  public at large could not  use or connect to them, DS lines  became known  as dedi- cated to the  customer leasing them. The entire series of DS standards eventu- ally became known  as the  dedicated carrier services network.

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