Assessment of the ability of an office local area network, employing the Technical Office Protocol (TOP) to carry interactive speech while heavily loaded with data traffic

The modern generation of office information systems are adopting local area networks (LANs) as the means of supporting the distributed computer systems currently being employed to provide electronic mail, word processing and file transfers facilities. Currently emerging standards tend to favour Carrier Sense Multiple Access Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) with Technical Office Protocol (TOP) for office automation. In addition to the transfer of data between workstations and processors a need has been established for verbal communication between users of the network on an interactive basis. PABXs already provide this facility but this necessitates the provision of a completely separate cabling network and exchange. It is proposed that LANs can provide the interactive speech facility in addition to the data handling capability and thus obviate the need for PABX, provided they are engineering with this as one of the initial specifications