Inside Windows® Server 2003

Functional Description of WAN Device Support

Outside the confines of PC networks, which run for the most part over a limited set of compatible Ethernet technologies, lies the wide world of WAN communications across the Public Switched Telephone Network, or PSTN. This is a world where flat satin cables lead to corroded punchdown blocks that connect to 30-year-old signal aggregators that tie to ATM interconnects that interface with multimillion-dollar switches that communicate over fiber optic networks designed and built by hundreds of different vendors and operated by thousands of corporate and government entities, all of whom never seem talk to each other over the very networks they control.

Apparently the only person in the last 50 years who ...