Seeking economies of scale and penetration into the US public telephone exchange market, GEC Plessey Telecommunications Ltd is planning to convergence the DCO Digital Central Office exchanges made by the Florida former Plessey subsidiary Stromberg Carlson Inc with its own System X. The companies say common elements will be deployed on the two switches in progessive stages; switching architecture will be based on a modular structure, with control being exercised by message-passing software of the kind used in System X. GEC Plessey claims the processing power of such a switch would be more than 1,000m instructions per second; it is planning to use the FDDI Fibre Distributed Data Interface to link control elements. The applications software is being written in the new C++ object-oriented derivative of the C language. Unlike System X, DCO was designed for the US market, in particular for use in smaller rural exchanges which actually represent a bigger market than the large exchanges that grab all the headlines; GEC Plessey wants the joint development to result in an international switch based on open interfaces, which will have the capacity to accommodate new features such as broadband Integrated Services Digital Neworking and intelligent network services.
