Infrastructure-independent technologies

Written on 10:56 AM by ooe

To complete the portfolio of access options available to network operators, it is necessary to introduce other options which are particularly (though not exclusively) applicable to new operators. Around the world, operators and bandwidth suppliers lease capacity that can provide access links. To increase the range of services that can be carried over a single leased circuit, equipment suppliers produce a range of proprietary multiplexors to aggregate traffic from different services, originally for the corporate networks market. Historically, these have been based on time division multiplexing (TDM), although cell relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and Ethernet based equipment is also in increasing commercial use. Multiplexor manufacturers include voice compression capability within their product ranges to ensure that the capability offered by a single leased line is maximised.

In countries where public voice telephony has been deregulated, access to alternative service providers can obtained via the incumbent's access network. An appropriate prefix is added to the dialled digits to signal to the incumbent voice switches that the call should be routed to an alternative service provider's network (‘indirect access’). This prefix can be entered manually by the customer or automatically by a PBX or ‘smartbox’ using a pre-assigned allocation of a prefix to classes of dialled digits. 1.5