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PSTN – Public Switched Telephone Network

Vangie Beal
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:52 am

Short for Public Switched Telephone Network, which refers to the international telephone system based on copper wires carrying analog voice data. This is in contrast to newer telephone networks base on digital technologies, such as ISDN and FDDI.

Telephone service carried by the PSTN is often called plain old telephone service (POTS).