ABSTRACT
Compelling, thought-provoking programming brings talent, listeners, experts, and events together. Despite being commonplace in broadcast facilities, interfacing telephone and Internet Protocol (IP) networks to broadcast studio equipment can still be challenging. This chapter is designed to provide a reference for legacy technologies: plain old telephone service and integrated services digital network. It also provides a working knowledge and best practice reference for IP-based remote connections. Most broadcast facilities have made the transition to digital systems—and many to audio over IP networked routing and mixing. The public switched telephone network (PSTN) has been almost entirely digitized for decades, beginning in the early 1960s with the first T1 circuits. Since digitization of the PSTN's infrastructure, audio characteristics have been consistent per specifications of the digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters. Calls traversing the PSTN from a given carrier, or handed off from one carrier to another, often suffer from cascading low-bitrate codecs.
