Public switched telephone network

The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the aggregate of the world's telephone networks that
are operated by national, regional, or local telephony operators. It provides infrastructure and services for
public telephony. The PSTN consists of telephone lines, fiber-optic cables, microwave transmission links,
cellular networks, communications satellites, and undersea telephone cables interconnected by switching
centers, such as central offices, network tandems, and international gateways, which allow telephone users
to communicate with each other.

Originally a network of fixed-line analog telephone systems, the PSTN is almost entirely digital in its core
network and includes mobile and wireless networks, all of which are currently transitioning to use the
Internet Protocol to carry their PSTN traffic.[1]

The technical operation of the PSTN adheres to the standards internationally promulgated by the ITU-T.
These standards have their origins in the development of local telephone networks, primarily in the Bell
System in the United States and in the networks of European ITU members. The E.164 standard provides a
single global address space in the form of telephone numbers. The combination of the interconnected
networks and a global telephone numbering plan allows telephones around the world to connect with each
other.[2]

History
Commercialization of the telephone began shortly after its invention, with instruments operated in pairs for
private use between two locations. Users who wanted to communicate with persons at multiple locations
had as many telephones as necessary for the purpose. Alerting another user of the desire to establish a
telephone call was accomplished by whistling loudly into the transmitter until the other party heard the alert.
Bells were soon added to stations for signaling.

Later telephone systems took advantage of the exchange principle already employed in telegraph networks.
Each telephone was wired to a telephone exchange established for a town or area. For communication
outside this exchange area, trunks were installed between exchanges. Networks were designed in a
hierarchical manner until they spanned cities, states, and international distances.

Automation introduced pulse dialing between the telephone and the exchange so that each subscriber could
directly dial another subscriber connected to the same exchange, but long-distance calling across multiple
exchanges required manual switching by operators. Later, more sophisticated address signaling, including
multi-frequency signaling methods, enabled direct-dialed long-distance calls by subscribers, culminating in
the Signalling System 7 (SS7) network that controlled calls between most exchanges by the end of the 20th
century.

The growth of the PSTN was enabled by teletraffic engineering techniques to deliver quality of service
(QoS) in the network. 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 end-to-end circuit-switched services, known as the Broadband
Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN). The B-ISDN vision was overtaken by the disruptive
technology of the Internet.

At the turn of the 21st century, the oldest parts of the telephone network still used analog baseband
technology to deliver audio-frequency connectivity over the last mile to the end-user. However, digital
technologies such as DSL, ISDN, FTTx, and cable modems were progressively deployed in this portion of
the network, primarily to provide high-speed Internet access.

As of 2023, operators worldwide are in the process of retiring support for both last-mile analog telephony
and ISDN, and transitioning voice service to Voice over IP via Internet access delivered either via DSL,
cable modems or fibre-to-the-premises, eliminating the expense and complexity of running two separate
technology infrastructures for PSTN and Internet access.

Several large private telephone networks are not linked to the PSTN, usually for military purposes. There
are also private networks run by large companies that are linked to the PSTN only through limited
gateways, such as a large private branch exchange (PBX).

Operators
The task of building the networks and selling services to customers fell to the network operators. The first
company to be incorporated to provide PSTN services was the Bell Telephone Company in the United
States.

In some countries, however, the job of providing telephone networks fell to government as the investment
required was very large and the provision of telephone service was increasingly becoming an essential
public utility. For example, the General Post Office in the United Kingdom brought together a number of
private companies to form a single nationalized company. In more recent decades, these state monopolies
were broken up or sold off through privatization.[3][4][5]

Technology

Network topology
The architecture of the PSTN evolved over time to support an increasing number of subscribers, call
volume, destinations, features, and technologies. The principles developed in North America and in Europe
were adopted by other nations, with adaptations for local markets.
A key concept was that the telephone exchanges are arranged into hierarchies, so that if a call cannot be
handled in a local cluster, it is passed to one higher up for onward routing. This reduced the number of
connecting trunks required between operators over long distances, and also kept local traffic separate.
Modern technologies have brought simplifications

Digital channels
Most automated telephone exchanges use digital switching rather than mechanical or analog switching. The
trunks connecting the exchanges are also digital, called circuits or channels. However analog two-wire
circuits are still used to connect the last mile from the exchange to the telephone in the home (also called the
local loop). To carry a typical phone call from a calling party to a called party, the analog audio signal is
digitized at an 8 kHz sample rate with 8-bit resolution using a special type of nonlinear pulse-code
modulation known as G.711. The call is then transmitted from one end to another via telephone exchanges.
The call is switched using a call set up protocol (usually ISUP) between the telephone exchanges under an
overall routing strategy.

The call is carried over the PSTN using a 64 kbit/s channel, originally designed by Bell Labs. The name
given to this channel is Digital Signal 0 (DS0). The DS0 circuit is the basic granularity of circuit switching
in a telephone exchange. A DS0 is also known as a timeslot because DS0s are aggregated in time-division
multiplexing (TDM) equipment to form higher capacity communication links.

A Digital Signal 1 (DS1) circuit carries 24 DS0s on a North American or Japanese T-carrier (T1) line, or 32
DS0s (30 for calls plus two for framing and signaling) on an E-carrier (E1) line used in most other
countries. In modern networks, the multiplexing function is moved as close to the end user as possible,
usually into cabinets at the roadside in residential areas, or into large business premises.

These aggregated circuits are conveyed from the initial multiplexer to the exchange over a set of equipment
collectively known as the access network. The access network and inter-exchange transport use
synchronous optical transmission, for example, SONET and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH)
technologies, although some parts still use the older PDH technology.

The access network defines a number of reference points. Most of these are of interest mainly to ISDN but
one, the V reference point, is of more general interest. This is the reference point between a primary
multiplexer and an exchange. The protocols at this reference point were standardized in ETSI areas as the
V5 interface.

Impact on IP standards
Voice quality in PSTN networks was used as a benchmark for the development of the Telecommunications
Industry Association's TIA-TSB-116 standard on voice-quality recommendations for IP telephony, to
determine acceptable levels of audio latency and echo.[6]

Regulation
In most countries, the government has a regulatory agency dedicated to provisioning of PSTN services. The
agency regulate technical standards, legal requirements, and set service tasks may be for example to ensure
that end customers are not over-charged for services where monopolies may exist. These regulatory
agencies may also regulate the prices charged between the operators to carry each other's traffic.

Service retirement
In the United Kingdom, the copper POTS and ISDN-based PSTN is being retired in favour of SIP
telephony, with a completion date of December 2025. See United Kingdom PSTN switch-off. Voice
telephony will continue to follow the E.163 and E.164 standards, as with current mobile telephony, with the
interface to end-users remaining the same.

Several other European countries, including Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal, have
also retired, or are planning to retire, their PSTN networks.[7][8]

Countries in other continents are also performing similar transitions.[8]

See also
List of country calling codes
Managed facilities-based voice network
Phreaking
Plain old telephone service (POTS)
Via Net Loss

References
1. Kushnick, Bruce (7 January 2013). "What Are the Public Switched Telephone Networks,
'PSTN' and Why You Should Care?" (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/public-switched-teleph
one-networks_b_2377773). HuffPost. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/2019121301083
0/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/public-switched-telephone-networks_b_2377773) from the
original on 13 December 2019. Retrieved 4 July 2020.
2. Werbach, Kevin D. (2013). "No Dialtone: The End of the Public Switched Telephone
Network" (https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2241658). SSRN Electronic Journal.
doi:10.2139/ssrn.2241658 (https://doi.org/10.2139%2Fssrn.2241658). ISSN 1556-5068 (http
s://www.worldcat.org/issn/1556-5068).
3. Information sheets and timelines. Privatisation (https://www.bt.com/bt-plc/assets/documents/
about-bt/our-history/bt-archives/information-sheets-and-timelines/privatisation.pdf)
4. British Telecom Privatisation (https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/briti
sh_telecom_privatisation.pdf)
5. Moon, Jeremy; Richardson, J.J.; Smart, Paul (1986). "The privatisation of British Telecom: A
case study of the extended process of legislation" (https://ejpr.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ab
s/10.1111/j.1475-6765.1986.tb00839.x). European Journal of Political Research. 14 (3):
339–355. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6765.1986.tb00839.x (https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1475-6765.
1986.tb00839.x).
6. "TIA TSB-116" (https://global.ihs.com/doc_detail.cfm?item_s_key=00381377). IHS Markit.
Telecommunications Industry Association. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/201707080
95959/https://global.ihs.com/doc_detail.cfm?item_s_key=00381377) from the original on 8
July 2017. Retrieved 20 November 2011.
 7. "Global Learnings For The PSTN Switch Off | Yay" (https://www.yay.com/blog/voip/global-pst
n-switchoff-learnings/). www.yay.com. Retrieved 4 October 2023.
8. "What the UK can learn from the rest of the world when it comes to the shift to IP" (https://busi
ness.bt.com/why-choose-bt/insights/ip-technology/ip-what-we-can-learn/). BT Business.
Retrieved 4 October 2023.

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