Transmission performance of 64 kbps switched digital international ISDN connections

An international 64 kbps switched digital ISDN service has been commercially in place since October 1989 between Japan and the United States. Service providers had to know about transmission quality to facilitate service planning. Other performance information was necessary for designing terminal equipment for both network users and telecommunication providers. Transmission performance was therefore characterized under real operating conditions. This paper evaluates overall transmission quality in terms of errored seconds (ES) and severely errored seconds (SES), and it shows there is very little difference between the performance of international end-to-end connections via fiber and satellite. The daily variation of ES and SES reveals that these connections exhibit behavior typical of digital circuits. This study also characterizes the distributions of bit errors per errored second, error event inter-arrival time distributions, and the distributions of error event lengths and intensities. The time between freeze-frame events are estimated for 64 kbps compressed video and the retransmission rate is estimated for Group IV facsimile