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The integrated systems have certain advantages, which unfortunately, however,only become noticeable if fairly large portions of a telephone networkoperate on this basis. The advantages derive from the fact that the sameinformation carriers are used throughout the system. The conventionalswitching technique with space separation may be said to be integrated withordinary physical circuits; if from there we proceed to multichannel systems,the exchanges as well should be electronic; and for the whole communicationsystem to be integrated, the same information carriers should be used throughout,which in practice would involve pulse systems.Within parentheses it may be remarked that integrated systems on afrequency separation basis would require electronic exchanges on the samebasis. This is not practicably possible without easily switchable filters, ofwhich at present there seems to be no prospect.Advances in System Engineering and AnalysisThe enormous advances in the field of mathematics during the last decadeswill bear fruit also in telephony. Mathematical statistics in particular will findprogressive applications. First there is traffic research, a classic field formathematical statistics. With the breadth that this research now has in theworld, many a long-debated problem may well find its solution. The natureof telephone traffic will undoubtedly be further elucidated. Some practicalproblems which will be cleared up are minimization of the number of switchingpoints in switching networks, and queuing problems with different types ofinterworking markers. Catalogues will be issued of gradings and so on. Digitalcomputers will be used to a greater extent for different problems of telephonetraffic analysis.A related sphere of applied mathematics, operations analysis, will also havewide applications. Certain fundamental problems are likely to be dealt with.One such problem, with wide implications, is the analysis of whole telephoneplants in order to obtain uniform dimensioning in every respect, as regardscongestion, attenuation and fault rate. The common denominator, so to speak,will be the inconvenience or cost to the subscriber or nation resulting fromthese inevitable imperfections. Different types of fault will be evaluated.Digital computers provide an entirely new means of analysis of alternativesolutions for the planning and location of exchanges. Maintenance, faulttracing etc. will be dealt with by operations analysis.It was thought that the rediscovery of Boole's algebra in the forties wouldprovide a short-cut in the design of relay circuits. This hope was disappointedsince the setting of the problem is as difficult as the finding of the solution.Boole's algebra, moreover, does not appear to be sufficiently flexible whenrelay times as well enter into the problem. Another approach will probably betried, by programming a digital computer to solve the problems. This wouldundoubtedly be no easy task and would take a considerable time to develop.It would be easier to check a found solution in a digital computer. Forproblems of this kind the computer technique with programmed logic hascertainly had a great influence on the design of markers and similar equipment.Digital computers have for a long time been used in an entirely differentfield, for the computation of filters. Even very complicated filters can now