Common control

Common control

In telecommunication, a common control is an automatic telephone exchange arrangement in which the control equipment necessary for the establishment of connections is shared by being associated with a given call only during the period required to accomplish the control function for the given call. The first examples deployed on a major scale were the Director telephone system in London and the panel switch in the Bell System. Direct control telephone exchanges became rare in the 1960s, leaving only common control ones.

Note: During the 1980s, common control exchanges became stored program control exchanges, using common channel signaling in which the channels that are used for signaling, whether frequency bands or time slots, are not used for message traffic.

References

 This article incorporates public domain material from the General Services Administration document "Federal Standard 1037C" (in support of MIL-STD-188).