Notes on the Network
technical publication of U.S. telecom industry
Notes on the Network was a publication of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) that outlined the state, technology, and operating principles of the public switched telephone network in the United States and Canada, and the other member regions of the North American Numbering Plan and its predecessors.
The origins of publication date back to the 1945 communications about Nationwide Operator Toll Dialing disseminated by AT&T to the Bell System companies and to the independent telephone operators via the Dial interexchange Committee of the United States Independent Telephone Association (USITA). In 1955, AT&T published the first extensive edition under the title Notes on Nationwide Dialing, which was updated the following year (1956) under the title Notes on Distance Dialing. Additional editions were issued in 1961, 1968, and 1975. The first use of the title Notes on the Network was for the 1980 edition.
After the breakup of AT&T and the Bell System, the document was maintained and published by Bell Communications Research (BELLCORE) in 1983, 1986, 1990, 1994, and 1997. The 1983 and 1986 versions were known as Notes on the BOC Intra-LATA Networks, while the 1990 and 1994 editions had the title BOC Notes on the LEC Networks. The 1997 issue was entitled Bellcore Notes on the Networks.
Through divestiture in 1999, Bellcore was renamed Telcordia. A new edition of the Notes (Issue 4) was published in 2000 as Telcordia Notes on the Networks, which is the most recent version, as of 2017.
The public source identifies “Notes on the Network” as technical publication of U.S. telecom industry. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Notes, Network and technical.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 26, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q17125169. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1955, 1956 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “Notes on the Network” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.