Service (telecommunications)
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When service is known in the telecommunications to transmit a telecommunications network information of a particular type and to provide the ability.
Traditionally, in the 20th century, a separate network was set up for each telecommunications service. For example:
- Voice service: telephone network
- Text service: Teletex , teletype network
- Data service: X.25 / DATEX-P network
- Telegram Service: Telegraph Network
Each network was optimized for the respective service. For this reason, the use of a certain network for another service was undesirable. Perhaps the best-known example is the decades-long resistance of the then Deutsche Post / Telecommunications Department against the use of the telephone network for data transmission via modems .
With ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) the rule of thumb “one service - one network” was abandoned. The aim of ISDN was to handle all services then and in the future over a single network and to replace all special networks. This was partly successful; however, ISDN was unable to meet the rapidly increasing bandwidth requirements of the Internet . This led to the development of supplementary network technologies such as DSL for access to ATM backbones via conventional telephone lines.
Since around the beginning of the 2000s, the trend has been towards handling classic services such as voice transmission or telephony also via the Internet, which was originally intended only for data transmission (see IP telephony , Next Generation Network ). The lack of fundamental properties of the Internet, such as guaranteed data packet runtimes or low jitter, make this a technical challenge. Services that had long been considered technically controlled or mature suddenly became difficult again due to the transfer to Internet technology. In the meantime, IP telephony is largely considered mature.