The History of The PSTN

Handwritten by Tian Davis

SUMMARY
Respoke gives you the power to build the next Skype in the
browser, on your smartphone and even on your desktop. It's all
possible because of the Public Switch Telephone
Network (PSTN). Here's a look at where the PSTN has been and
where we're taking it...

HISTORY OF THE PSTN

The history of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) is
the history of American Bell and AT&T. In 1875 Alexander Bell
formed the American Bell Telephone Company. A year later in
1876, Alexander Bell patented the first improvement in
telegraphy and made the first ever voice transmission over wire.
It was hardly what we can imagine today.
The first voice transmission used what is called a ring-down
circuit. What that means is there were no dialing of numbers; No
ringing of headsets. Instead, an actual physical wire connected
two devices. Remember when you were a kid and you'd play tin

can telephone. What did you do? You connected two tin cans by
wire. Then you could here your friend talk on the other end. A
ring-down circuit is a lot like playing tin can telephone, just over
a greater distance.
Initially, telephone users had to whistle into the phone to attract
the attention of another telephone user. Within a year of
Alexandar's patent, he added a calling bell to make signaling
easier.
Over time, this simple design evolved from a one-way voice
transmission, by which only one user could speak, to a bidirectional voice transmission, whereby both users could speak.
Things started to get a little more complicated at this point.
Moving the voices across the wire required a carbon
microphone, a battery, an electromagnet, and an iron diaphragm.
The concept of dialing a number to reach a destination still
didn't exist. The also process required a physical cable between
each location that the user wanted to call. Clearly this does not
scale...
Placing a physical cable between every household that required
access to a telephone was neither cost effective or feasible. Bell
developed another method that could map any phone to another
phone without a direct connection. Bell patented the device and
called it a switch.

With a switch telephone, users only needed connection to a

centralized office. Then that centralized office could coordinate
connected the call to its final destination.
Imagine a pair of copper wires running from every phone to a
central exchange in your town. At the exchange, the operator
had a big switchboard. The switchboard had a 2 pin connection
socket - called a jack socket - for every pair of wires entering the
exchange.
When you wanted to talk to another person, you would ring the
operator and give the name or number of the other party. Then
the operator would connect a patch cord ( a 2 wire cable with a
jack plug on each end ) between the two phones and the two
people could communicate. Using a patch cord - a two wire
cable with a jack plug on each end - the operator would connect
each party's jack socket. Then the receiving party's telephone
bell would ring and the two parties could communicate.
Believe it or not, the first operators were teenage boys.
Surprising - I know - but they often engaged in horseplay and
foul language:

Telephone companies soon began hiring young women in order

to present a more civilized image to customers:

Women would go on to dominate the switchboard profession.

Operators were well trained in switchboard technique and in
deportment, before starting work on the switchboards. Here are
a group training in switchboard technique and in deportment
before starting work on the switchboard. Denver, Colorado
1910:

Here's another group of operators at a switchboard in Santa Fe,

New Mexico 1921:

Bundles of wires called trunks ran between exchanges, forming

proto-networks. Networks connected together until they
connected countries across the world. This was the beginning of
the PSTN.
At first the telephone operator acted as a switch. Fast forward
100 years - give or take a decade - and the electronic switch
replaced the human switch.

THE PSTN TODAY

What started as direct home to home connections, evolved into

home to central switch connections. Human powered switches
we called operators evolved into analog switches and then into
electronic switches. A lot also changed along the way.

Analog voice signals carried across the wire with amplifiers

evolved into digital signals carried across the globe with
repeaters. Repeater simply repeat whatever binary data it
receives. If the repeater received 010101, it passed on 010101.
All digital meant cleaner sound quality travelled over longer and
longer distances. It also meant the PSTN could release new
features faster. Features like call waiting and call forwarding and
conference calling were now built into the PSTN message
driven network.
As technology progressed, the telephony industry found an
alternative to message formats and during the dawn of the
Internet a new transport format was invented - packets. This
formed the foundation of what would become a separate data
network.
Instead of being transmitted over a circuit-switched network, the
digital information is packetized, and transmission occurs as IP
packets over a packet-switched network. These packet-switched

networks form the foundation of the Voice Over IP (VOIP)

technology we know today.
Now we live in a world of two networks; One circuit-switched
and the other packet-switched. When those worlds interoperate,
they do so using protocols that enable packet-switched digital
data to communicated with circuit-switched digital data. Those
protocols include, but are not limited to: H.264, V8, H.232,
H.323, SIP, MGCP and others.
Currently H.323 is the most widely deployed VoIP call-control
protocol. H.323, however, is not widely seen as a protocol that is
robust enough for PSTN networks. For these networks, other
protocols such as Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP) and
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) are being developed.
PHONE NUMBERS
Phone numbers in particular are fascinating. Phone numbers are
simply different across the globe. To bring the point home, take
a look at a few numbers across locales:
USA (NANP): +1 (555) 555-5555
India: +91 22 555 5555
London: +44 20 5555 5555
The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) is an integrated
telephone numbering plan serving 20 North American countries
that share its resources. These countries include the United

States and its territories, Canada, Bermuda, Anguilla, Antigua &

Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, the British Virgin Islands, the
Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada,
Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Maarten, St. Kitts and Nevis, St.
Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and
Turks & Caicos.
Regulatory authorities in each participating country have
plenary authority over numbering resources, but the
participating countries share numbering resources cooperatively.
AT&T developed the North American Numbering Plan in 1947
to simplify and facilitate direct dialing of long distance calls.
Implementation of the plan began in 1951.
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) assigned
country code "1" to the NANP area. The NANP conforms with
ITU Recommendation E.164, the international standard for
telephone numbering plans.
NANP numbers are ten-digit numbers consisting of a three-digit
Numbering Plan Area (NPA) code, commonly called an area
code, followed by a seven-digit local number. The format is
usually represented as:
+1 NXX-NXX-XXXX

where N is any digit from 2 through 9 and X is any digit from 0

through 9. Routing calls requires multiple switching offices. The
phone number itself is a coded map for routing the call.
In the NANP countries, for example, we have 10-digit phone
numbers: - The first three digits are the area code or national
destination code (NDC), which helps route the call to the right
regional switching station.
The next three digits are the exchange, which represents the
smallest amount of circuits that can be bundled on the same
switch. In other words, when you make a call to another user
in your same exchange - maybe a neighbor around the
corner - the call doesn't have to be routed onto another
switch.
The last four digits of the phone number represent the
subscriber number, which is tied to your specific address and
phone lines.
Within a company or larger organization, each employee or
department might have its own extension. Extensions from the
main phone number are routed through something called a
private branch exchange (PBX) that operates on the premises.
To make an international call requires further instructions.
The call needs to be routed through your long-distance phone
carrier to another country's long-distance phone carrier. To

signal such a switch, you have to dial two separate numbers,

your country's exit code (or international access code) and the
corresponding country code of the place you're calling.
Almost all exit codes are either 00 or 011, although there are a
few exceptions like Cuba (119) and Nigeria (009). Country
codes are one - to three-digit prefixes that are assigned to
specific countries or groups of countries.
For example, the country code for the United States is 1, but the
United States shares that country code with Canada and several
smaller island nations like Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Guam.

PBX
No doubt you've heard the term PBX before. A PBX or Private
Branch Exchange is a small telephone switch - think of it as a
mini exchange.
Businesses install PBXs to reduce the number of phone lines
they need to lease from the telephone company. Imagine that
without a PBX, you would have to to rent one telephone line for
every employee with a phone.
With a PBX system, you only need to rent as many lines from
your telephone provider as the maximum number of staff
making external calls at one time. In most businesses this is only
about 10-12% of the workforce.

What you didn't know is before the tangled mess of PBX's gone
by:

There were human powered switchboard operators in

businesses, government and large commercial buildings:

Of course, not even remotely as large as your local switchboard

would be. Here there were usually anywhere from 2-4 people at
most:

In the PBX system, every telephone in a business location is

wired to the PBX, using either standard cables or more recently
Cat 5 ethernet cabling. When a member of staff picks up their
phone and dials the outside access code (usually 9), the PBX
connects that person to an outside line, and onto the PSTN.
PBX solutions themselves have gone from a consortium of wires
and frames to a single commodity hardware or higher grade
application running open source software that allows you to
create a virtual PBX.

Open source software like Asterisk is an example of this

paradigm shift. With Asterisk you can create a PBX, an IVR
system, a conference bridge and virtually any other
communications app you can imagine. Asterisk was one of the
first open source PBX software packages.
Asterisk supports a wide range of Voice over IP protocols,
including the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the Media
Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP), and H.323. Asterisk can
interoperate with most SIP telephones, acting both as registrar
and as a gateway between IP phones and the PSTN.

PSTN AT RESPOKE
The PBX has gone from a tangled mess of wires to software
running on commodity boxes to a hosted PBX in the cloud. The
web was only the natural progression.
You can use Respoke to make phone calls and receive phone
calls from phones on the PSTN as well as other Respoke client
endpoints. It's easy...
// here's the App ID value from the portal:
var appid = "DD90A374-0C06-456F-9D4F-E8038E6523D2";
// create a client object using the App ID value
var client = respoke.createClient({
appId: appid,
developmentMode: true
});
// listen for the 'connect' event
client.listen('connect', function () {
console.log("Connected to Respoke!");
});
//Now all you have to do is make a call
client.startPhoneCall({

});

number: "+15558675309"

//Attach listener to receive calls

client.listen('call', function (event) {
if (event.call.fromType === 'did') {
// We got a call from a phone number!
}
if (!event.call.caller) {
event.call.answer();
}
});

Using a combination of WebRTC media channel and good 'ol

fashioned ingenuity, Respoke takes your IP based voice data and
converts it into digital SIP data which can be consumed by
regular phone devices.
If you're talking to someone on the web or VOIP device, your
voice data stays on the packet-switched network - just like a
regular VOIP call. If you're talking to someone on a cellphone
carrier or landline, Respoke takes care of the details to
communicate with that person's circuit-switched network.
Of course you can do a lot of other things with Respoke as well.
Like video, voice and text communications. Now you have
access to the PSTN network as well. Sky's the limit from here on
out.