Communications: The military goes digital: Digital switching and signaling, along with digital transmission, offer reliability in a hostile environment

For military needs, the smaller size, simpler design, and lower cost of digital switching systems are important features, just as they are in commercial telephone applications. In addition, powerful digital signaling and error-control techniques — available in all-digital telephone systems — provide highly reliable signaling and allow signaling throughput to be maintained in higherror-rate transmission environments.