Abstract :
This brief survey leads the author to the view that for commercial telecommunications applications, satellites have some significant advantages over Earth bound transmission facilities, but that despite these their role in the public switched telephone network will diminish. For the main trunk routes optical fibre cables may be expected to cater for an increasing proportion of traffic. The volume of regular PSTN traffic handled by satellite is foreseen to grow, but at a much slower rate than the total traffic volume, and in some areas it may actually fall. In the European network the number of satellite connection points seems likely to expand, but not generally to below ISC level
