During the past few years,both Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and Local Area Network (LAN) technologies have been assuming increasingly important roles in office communication.Northern Telecom's MeridianTM SL Integrated Services Network office communications architecture combines the best of both PBX and LAN technologies.The star topology,use of twisted-pair wiring and high standard of reliability of the modern,digital PBX have been retained.However,the traditional PBX architecture has been extended to support distributed multiprocessing,packet switching,and high speed data access,using ordinary twisted-pair telephone wiring.This new architecture is capable of supporting a wide range of office data communications and information processing services,as well as traditional voice and data circuitswitched PBX services.In this paper,the details of this architecture,including hardware components,software structure,and some examples of services implementation are described.
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