Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network
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In the 1980s the telecommunications industry expected that digital services would follow much the same pattern as voice services did on the public switched telephone network, and conceived a grandiose vision of end-to-end circuit switched services, known as the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN). This was designed in the 1990s as a logical extension of the end-to-end circuit switched data service, ISDN.
The technology for B-ISDN was going to be Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), which was intended to carry both synchronous voice and asynchronous data services on the same transport.
The B-ISDN vision has been overtaken by the disruptive technology of the Internet. The ATM technology survives as a low-level layer in most DSL technologies, and as a payload type in some wireless technologies such as WiMAX.
[edit] See also
- Dynamic synchronous Transfer Mode, a revival of circuit switching technology for broadband traffic
