> "Data could ride a voice-grade connection just..."
Perhaps this mindset was true at the AT&T / (eventual) RBOC level but at the R&D level I believe the story was different.
My father worked for Western Electric. For those who don't already know, WE's role was to take Bell Labs "raw" R&D and make it work commercially. In any case, when I was a pre-teen / teen (think early to mid 70's, if my memory serves me correctly) I remember going to an annual open house (for family members) an seeing demos on fiber optics.
Maybe the plan was to use fiber strictly for voice, but that feels odd to me.
p.s. Fwiw my father actually worked on a technology that then competed with fiber. As we know now, fiber won. My point is, there was a sense somewhere that additional capacity was necessary. That amount of investment for the growth of voice might be possible, but I don't think so.
Maybe the plan was to use fiber strictly for voice, but that feels odd to me.
If you've seen the eye-watering cost of 1600 pair copper bearers, not to mention the sheer time taken to joint it, you'd see why the telcos were keen on fibre for voice.
“SONET was originally designed to transport circuit mode communications from a variety of different sources, but they were primarily designed to support real-time, uncompressed, circuit-switched voice encoded in PCM format.”
Yes, I get the impression that the plan until ATM came along was to build exclusively circuit-based networks with most of the circuits used for voice and some for data.
Perhaps this mindset was true at the AT&T / (eventual) RBOC level but at the R&D level I believe the story was different.
My father worked for Western Electric. For those who don't already know, WE's role was to take Bell Labs "raw" R&D and make it work commercially. In any case, when I was a pre-teen / teen (think early to mid 70's, if my memory serves me correctly) I remember going to an annual open house (for family members) an seeing demos on fiber optics.
Maybe the plan was to use fiber strictly for voice, but that feels odd to me.
p.s. Fwiw my father actually worked on a technology that then competed with fiber. As we know now, fiber won. My point is, there was a sense somewhere that additional capacity was necessary. That amount of investment for the growth of voice might be possible, but I don't think so.