Switch56 (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles Nortel's Switch56 was a networking protocol built on top of the telephone cabling hardware of their Digital Multiplex System and other telephone switches. The name comes from the fact that Switch56 carried 56 kbit/s of data on its 64 kbit/s lines, as opposed to most systems, including ISDN, where the entire 64 kbit/s bandwidth was available for data. The speed was a side effect of Nortel using a 2-wire cable to carry both voice and switching commands, as opposed to other systems where the command data was carried on a separate set of low-speed lines. Switch56 "folded" the two sources of data into one, placing a single bit from the command channel onto the end of every 7 bits of data, similar to the original T-carrier supervision scheme. This data was split out at the "far end" as 56 kbit/s and 8 kbit/s subchannels.