Existing phone systems are driven by a very reliable but somewhat inefficient method for connecting calls called circuit switching.
Circuit switching is a very basic concept that has been used by telephone networks for wee over 100 years. When a call is made between two parties, the connection is maintained for the duration of the call. Because you’re connecting two points in both directions, the connection is called a circuit. This is the foundation of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
This how a typical telephone call works:
1. You pick up the receiver and listen for a dial tone. This lets you know that you have a connection to the local office of your telephone carrier.
2. You dial the number of the party you wish to talk to.
3. The call is routed through the switch at your local exchange to the party you are calling.
4. A connection is made between your telephone and the other party’s line using several interconnected switches along the way.
5. The phone you are calling rings, and someone answers.
6. The circuit opens.
7. You talk for a period of time and then hang up.
8. Hanging up, causes the circuit to close, freeing your line and all the lines in between.
Let’s say you talk for 20 minutes. During this time, the circuit is continuously open between the two phones. In the early phone system, up until 1960 or so, every call had to have a dedicated wire stretching from one end of the call to the other for the duration of the call. So if you were in London and you wanted to call Manchester, the switches between London and Manchester would connect pieces of copper wire all the way across the United Kingdom. You would use all those pieces of wire just for your call for the full 20 minutes. You paid a lot for the call, because you actually owned a 220-mile-long copper wire for 20 minutes.
Telephone conversations over today’s traditional phone network are somewhat more efficient and they cost a lot less. Your voice is digitized and your voice along with thousands of others can be combined onto a single fiber optic cable for much of the journey (there’s still a dedicated piece of copper wire going into your home though). These calls are transmitted at a fixed rate of 64 kilobits per second (Kbps) in each direction, for a total transmission rate of 128 Kbps. Since there are 8 kilobits (Kb) in a kilobyte (KB), this translates to a transmission of 16 KB each second the circuit is open, and 960 KB every minute it’s open. In a 20-minute conversation, the total transmission is 19,200 KB, which is roughly equal to 20 megabytes If you look at a typical phone conversation, much of this transmitted data is wasted.
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