Telephones: Digitizing and Delivering

The concentrator digitizes your voice at a sample rate of 8,000 samples per second and 8-bit resolution (see How Analog and Digital Recording Works for information on digitizing sounds). It then combines your voice with dozens of others and sends them all down a single wire (usually a coax cable or a fiber-optic cable) to the phone company office. Either way, your line connects into a line card at the switch so you can hear the dial tone when you pick up your phone.

This illustration shows the entire telephone network, including a home connection, cell phone towers, long distance exchanges and transcontinental connections. Click here to see the animated version!

Hand Generated! You know the hand crank on those old-fashioned telephones? It was used to generate the ring-signal AC wave and sound the bell at the other end!

If you are calling someone connected to the same office, then the switch simply creates a loop between your phone and the phone of the person you called. If it's a long-distance call, then your voice is digitized and combined with millions of other voices on the long-distance network. Your voice normally travels over a fiber-optic line to the office of the receiving party, but it may also be transmitted by satellite or by microwave towers. (See How does a long-distance call work? for a more detailed description.)