SWITCHING NETWORK IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS The direction of this paper is to describe a telecommunications switch and show its purpose and multitasking abilities. This paper will use the AT&T 5ESS Switch to give a real world example of a top rated telecommunications switch. The end result will be an understanding of how a switch works and what it can do. Also, it will show why the AT&T 5ESS Switch is #1 in today's telecommunication world. SWITCHINGIn today's world a person should be able to pick up his phone and dial to almost anywhere in the world. Without knowing anything about switching, one would think that there phone would have to have a separate line to everyone other phone in the world. This would be quite a lot of lines into just one phone and know that this is an impossible scenario. This is why the switched network was developed. A switched network brings each subscriber line into a centralized switching system, where connections are made for each call.The earliest telephone switches were hand-operated - that is, they required a human operator to make connections by plugging circuits into a switchboard. When the customer "rang" the central office, the operator scanned the switchboard and connected the caller by plugging into the requested line. The invention of the mechanical switch came about in the late 1880. Now, the mechanical switch replaced the human operator, who handled the physical connections. These early switching systems were based on the analog technology that was state-of-the-art electronics at the time. By the mid 1970's digital technologies were being introduced into the core of the public switched network. Digital switches fully capitalized on the strength of the computer revolution by routing both voice and data through the switch in the form of 0/1 binary coded information, which can be moved through the switch in a very short period of time. A single digital switch typically serves anywhere f...
