Telecommunication Exchange Evolution

To telecommunicate means to communicate over distance. The information that is communicated can be of many different forms. Communication over distance has been performed in many different ways if we look back in history, e.g. via drums, fire, telegraph, telephone and more recently also via various computer terminals. This article focuses on the telecommunication exchange development and evolution that for long was driven by the voice communication via telephone sets but that now involves also many other kinds of information carrying medias and the related encoding of the media and thus information. To make the communications economically attractive network topologies have been built to efficiently allow the sharing of physical resources along the paths between communicating parties with access to the network. These resources for example including cables, switches, routers, media translators and radio stations needed to carry the communicated information. An exchange is an important node in the network where several such resources are aggregated in an integrated system node and that is used to connect and enable access to different parts of the whole network. The network and the exchanges are complex long term investments that have evolved and changed over the years in order to cope with new services and challenges in an economically efficient way