Telecommunications Essentials

Multiplexing

Multiplexers, often called muxes, are extremely important to telecommunications. Their main reason for being is to reduce network costs by minimizing the number of communications links needed between two points. As with all other computing systems, multiplexers have evolved. Each new generation has additional intelligence, and additional intelligence brings more benefits. The types of benefits that have accrued, for example, include the following:

• The capability to do data compression so that you can encode certain characters with fewer bits than normally required and free up that additional capacity for the movement of other information.

• The capability to do error detection and correction between the two points that are being connected ...