Increasing demand for advanced voice‐and‐facsimile network services has motivated the recent introduction of an important, new, programmable network element: AT&T's A‐I‐Net™ service‐circuit node. This new network element complements existing network switching and database elements by providing internal network access to a programmable node that has highly specialized service circuits. These circuits support network services that involve the synthesis, interpretation, repetition, or translation of voiceband information. Although the central‐office and operations‐support interfaces we describe are designed for the United States market, the service‐circuit node provides a flexible base for supporting interfaces that are appropriate for other markets, too. As service‐circuit technology continues to advance to support complex, image‐processing functions (e.g., facsimile or speaker recognition), service providers will require greater flexibility for developing services that use these functions. An applications‐development environment, based on application‐oriented‐language technology, enables service providers to introduce new capabilities rapidly into existing networks.

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Growing demand for high‐bit‐rate, large switching fabrics is forcing a reexamination of conventional electronic interconnection systems. A conclusion of this examination is that any large switching system will require thousands of connections at high rates to communicate the volume of data anticipated in future broadband switches. For example, a broadband switching fabric with 256 inputs and outputs each running at 622 Mbit/s would require a throughput of 160 Gbit/s. An approach to relieve the electronic interconnection bottleneck is to use optical connections. Photonics allows chip‐to‐chip and board‐to‐board communications at high rates to support building large switching fabrics. This paper discusses an approach that is being pursued to move the current state‐of‐the‐art photonics work into a switching fabric capable of routing, in real‐time, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) cells received from 622 Mbit/s lines through a switching fabric that has 256 inputs and 256 outputs.