Broadband ISDN: An Overview

This issue of the AT&T Technical Journal is dedicated to the architecture known as the broadband integrated services digital network, or BISDN — the standards recommendations that define it, the technologies that enable it, and trends in business and society that are intensifying market demand for the emerging applications it will support. BISDN has the potential to be the next-generation infrastructure not only for the telecommunications carriers' public networks, but also — in the context of increasing demands for sophisticated high-bandwidth, or broadband, services — for customers' private networks, including local-area, metropolitan-area, and wide-area networks. This remarkable new synergy between premises networks and public networks offers customers dramatic new possibilities of seamless end-to-end information networking. Together with new techniques for transporting voice, data, and video, BISDN makes it possible to deploy multimedia services with powerful signaling and control capabilities. The papers in this issue capture a broad, representative view of this dynamic subject and provide a snapshot of AT&T's rapidly expanding activities in implementing BISDN.