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Basic Phone Services

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49 views5 pages

Basic Phone Services

Uploaded by

artsan3
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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by Steve Steinke

Tutorial Index

Lesson 89: Basic Phone Services


and Circuits
Here's how to go the last mile with the phone company.
Telephone company offerings are complex. Unless we have corporate
responsibility for provisioning voice or data telecommunications
services from the telephone company, most of us rarely have any
involvement with telephone lines aside from the analog local loop that
provides the voice services that allow telemarketers to call us during
dinner.

While telephone company offerings can be really hard to understand


and to distinguish between even that is easy in comparison to
understanding their costs. This tutorial can't begin to tackle the cost
issue, but it will try to make the relevant distinctions among some of
the more frequently encountered products and services available from
telephone service providers.

ANALOG LINES, DIGITAL LINES

The first important distinction is between analog and digital lines.


Analog signals vary continuously, and they represent particular values,
such as the volume and pitch of a voice or the color and brightness of
a section of an image. Digital signals have meaning only at discrete
levels-in the most common case, the signal is either on or off, present
or absent, 1 or 0.

Analog telephone lines are the legacy systems of the telephone


universe. The great preponderance of residential telephone lines is
analog. Fifty-year-old telephones will probably work on your local
loop-the connection between your home telephone jack and the
telephone company's central office. (Your central office is probably
not a gigantic building downtown-the average local loop is about 2.5
miles long [four kilometers], so the "central office" is most often an
inconspicuous building in or near your neighborhood.)

When you talk on the telephone, the microphone in the "receiver"


(while you're talking, it's actually a transmitter) produces an analog
signal that travels to the central office and is switched either to another

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local destination or to other switching offices that connect it to a
remote destination. Dialing the telephone produces the in-band signals
that tell the switching system where to route the call. The telephone
companies have learned a great deal about the electrical characteristics
of human voice signals over the years, and they have determined that
we will be reasonably satisfied with voice signals that do not transmit
frequencies below 300Hz or above 3,100Hz. Note that high fidelity is
usually considered to be a system that can reproduce frequencies
between 20Hz and 20KHz without distortion-while voices are
recognizable with the standard telephone frequency range, that range
of frequencies is likely to be inadequate for other types of sounds-for
instance, music sounds lousy over the telephone. To allow for gradual
roll-offs of high and low frequencies, the telephone companies allow
an analog telephone channel a bandwidth of 4,000Hz to work with.

At the central office, the odds are that the analog signal will be
digitized in order to be switched across the telephone network. Aside
from Giblet County, AK, and Rat Fork, WY, the U.S. telephone
network that interconnects central offices uses digital signaling.
Although many urban business telephone users have digital services
direct to their PBXs or data communication devices, and ISDN lines
are digital, the local loop is sometimes referred to as "the last mile,"
because residences, generally saddled with analog-only transmission
facilities, are rarely capable of bandwidth greater than 4,000Hz.

WHAT CAN 4KHz DO?

Modems convert digital signals from a computer into analog signals in


the telephone frequency range. There is a hard upper limit to the
capacity of a channel with a given bandwidth. A channel's throughput
in bits per second depends on the bandwidth and the achievable
signal-to-noise ratio. The current top throughput rate for modems of
33.6Kbps is quite close to the limit. As users of 28.8Kbps modems
know, the actual throughput achievable on normally noisy analog lines
is rarely the full-rated value, and it may be much lower. Compression
and caching and other tricks can mask the limit to an extent, but we'll
see perpetual motion machines before we see a modem with, say,
50Kbps or even 40Kbps throughput on ordinary analog telephone
lines.

When the telephone company reverses the process and digitizes an


analog signal, it uses a 64Kbps channel. (This conversion is a
worldwide standard.) One of these channels, called a DS0 (digital
signal, level zero), is the basic building block for telephone processes.
You can agglomerate (the precise term is multiplex) 24 DS0s into a
DS1. If you lease a T-1 line, you get a DS1 channel. With
synchronization bits after each 192 bits (that is, 8,000 times a second),
the DS1 capacity is 1.544Mbps (the product of 24 and 64,000, added
to 8,000).

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DEDICATED LINES, SWITCHED LINES

The second important distinction to make about telephone lines is


whether they are dedicated circuits you lease or switched services you
buy. If you order a T-1 line or a low data-rate leased line such as
dataphone digital service (DDS), you are renting a point-to-point
facility from the telephone company. You have dedicated use of such a
circuit-with 1.544Mbps (T-1) or 56Kbps (low data rate) of capacity,
respectively.

While frame relay services are switched through a cloud frame by


frame, they are invariably sold as permanent virtual circuits, where the
customer specifies the end points. For purposes of designing a
network layout, frame relay links have more in common with
dedicated lines than with switched lines, but the cost can be
substantially lower for an equivalent capacity. Switched services, such
as residential analog telephone service, are services purchased from
the telephone company. You can select any destination on the
telephone network and connect to it through the network of public
switches. You generally pay for connect time or actual traffic volume,
so unlike a dedicated line, the bill will be low if usage is low. Switched
digital services include X.25, Switched 56, ISDN Basic Rate Interface
(BRI), ISDN Primary Rate Interface (PRI), Switched Multimegabit
Data Service (SMDS), and ATM. It's also possible to set up private
networks that supply these services using your own switching
equipment and leased lines or even privately owned lines-for example,
if you are a university, a railroad, or a municipal utility.

If the circuit provided by the phone company is already a digital


circuit, there is no need for a modem to provide digital-to-analog
conversion services between the terminal equipment (phone company
talk for such equipment as computers, fax machines, videophones, and
digital telephone instruments) and the telephone system. Nonetheless,
customer premises equipment still needs to behave like a good citizen
of the telephony network. In particular, it must present the correct
electrical termination to the local loop, transmit traffic properly, and
support phone company diagnostic procedures.

A line that supports ISDN BRI service must be connected to a device


called an NT1 (network termination 1). In addition to the line
termination and diagnostic functions, the NT1 interface converts the
two-wire local loop to the four-wire system used by digital terminal
equipment. For digital leased lines-T-1 and DDS-and for the digital
services, the digital subscriber line from the phone company needs to
be terminated by a channel service unit or CSU. The CSU terminates
and conditions the line and responds to diagnostic commands.
Customer terminal equipment is designed to interface with a data
service unit (DSU), which hands over properly formatted digital

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signals to the CSU. CSUs and DSUs are often combined into a single
unit-a CSU/DSU, of all things. The DSU may be built into a router or
multiplexer. So even though end-to-end digital services don't require
modems, a piece or two of interfacing hardware is always required for
connectivity.

MEDIA FOR PHONE SERVICES

While 33.6Kbps is a stretch for most local loops configured for analog
service, the same twisted-pair wiring running between your house and
a central office is very likely capable of supplying ISDN BRI service,
with 128Kbps of data throughput capacity and another 16Kbps of
control and setup capacity. How is this possible? Analog telephone
circuits are heavily filtered to keep the signals attenuated outside their
4KHz bandwidth. Digital circuits don't need to be filtered the same
way, so the twisted pair cable can support a much greater bandwidth,
which allows greater throughput.

Leased 56Kbps and 64Kbps lines and services that run on these lines,
such as frame relay and Switched 56, may be delivered on a two-wire
digital line or on a four-wire digital line (which has separate wire pairs
for transmitting and receiving). T-1 lines as well as ISDN PRI and
frame relay are often delivered on four-wire digital lines or perhaps on
optical fiber. T-3 lines are sometimes coaxial cable, but most
high-capacity traffic is carried on optical fiber. While ISDN is getting a
lot of attention as a high-capacity, wide-area connection, it is not the
last word on throughput for the "last mile." PairGain (Tustin, CA) and
AT&T Paradyne (Largo, FL) market products using Bellcore's
(Piscataway, NJ) high bit-rate digital subscriber loop (HDSL)
technology. These products serve to equalize local loops dynamically,
making it possible to support DS1 throughput-1.544Mbps-over most
existing twisted pair local loops, provided that HDSL devices are
installed at both ends. (With standard 24-gauge wire, HDSL can be
used successfully on local loops up to 2.3 miles long, with no
repeaters. Ordinary T-1 circuits require repeaters at least every 3,000
feet to 5,000 feet.) If you want to transport DS1 levels of traffic over
the last mile, the alternatives to HDSL are to install "fiber to the curb"
at great expense or to install several repeaters on each line, which is
not as expensive as all-new fiber but is still costly and imposes a large
maintenance cost on the telephone company (and, ultimately, on the
customer).

HDSL is not even the final word on improving the throughput of the
last mile. Asymmetrical digital subscriber line technology (ADSL), an
extension to HDSL, is expected to support throughput as high as
6Mbps in a single direction, with a much lower throughput-perhaps
64Kbps-in the other direction. In a perfect-or at least
competitive-world, where customers pay for a telephone service based
on the actual cost of delivering that service, a high percentage of

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analog telephone customers could receive ISDN PRI (or another T-1
service) at a price comparable to today's cost for ISDN BRI.

But, perhaps today's ISDN promoters don't have much to worry


about. In most cases, telephone companies can install these special line
equalizers and keep the savings to themselves. As is so often the case
with tariffed services, there's no requirement that the rates be rational.

Copyright © 1997 Miller Freeman Inc., a United News & Media company.

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