Circuit Switched Data

In communications, Circuit Switched Data (CSD) is the original form of data transmission developed for the time division multiple access (TDMA)-based mobile phone systems like Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). After 2010 many telecommunication carriers dropped support for CSD, and CSD has been superseded by GPRS and EDGE (E-GPRS).

CSD uses a single radio time slot to deliver 9.6 kbit/s data transmission to the GSM network switching subsystem where it could be connected through the equivalent of a normal modem to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), allowing direct calls to any dial-up service. For backwards compatibility, the IS-95 standard also supports CDMA Circuit Switched Data. However, unlike TDMA, there are no time slots, and all CDMA radios can be active all the time to deliver up to 14.4 kbit/s data transmission speeds. With the evolution of CDMA to CDMA2000 and 1xRTT, the use of IS-95 CDMA Circuit Switched Data declined in favour of the faster data transmission speeds available with the newer technologies.

Prior to CSD, data transmission over mobile phone systems was done by using a modem, either built into the phone or attached to it. Such systems were limited by the quality of the audio signal to 2.4 kbit/s or less. With the introduction of digital transmission in TDMA-based systems like GSM, CSD provided almost direct access to the underlying digital signal, allowing for higher speeds. At the same time, the speech-oriented audio compression used in GSM actually meant that data rates using a traditional modem connected to the phone would have been even lower than with older analog systems.

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