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.

See also

• Dynamic synchronous Transfer Mode, a revival of circuit switching technology for broadband traffic

External links

• http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/1047/bisdn.html
• http://repositories.cdlib.org/cpcc/2/