PRANA at the Age of Four: Multiservice Loops Reach Out

Can the French loop plant support voice and multiservice data traffic simultaneously? If so, what techniques are available for practical ISDN operations before 1990, at prices attractive to the domestic subscriber? Four years ago CNET, the French National Center for Telecommunications Research, agreed to back our plan for finding practical answers to those questions. This paper presents our methods and findings. Our program groups capabilities for: voice communications, in either analog or digital form; telematics services, up to 64 kbits/s; and conventional datacomm, at selectable rates up to 9600 bits/s. We call the system PRANA, a French-language acronym for Digital Subscriber Loop System.