On The Road to Universal Information Services (UIS): The Integrated Access Terminal
01 January 1989
The talk will discuss various uses of the Integrated Access Terminal (IAT) of the Wideband Packet Network to achieve the promises of Universal Information Services (UIS). The IAT provides direct digital connectivity at 1.536 Mb/s to customer terminals as well as circuit- and packet- switched networks. I intergrates voice, voiceband data, digital data, signaling, image and network control into packets of common format. It allows networking in both the circuit and packet domains and offers bandwidth on demand. In addition, the IAT provides the flexibility of supporting a variety of CCITT speech encoding algorithms and to adapt gracefully and rapidly to changing traffic patterns. Finally, a network of IATs can be controlled by a single Integrated Access Controller (IAC) which centralizes network provisioning, management and maintenance.