E-1 Carrier

In digital telecommunications, where a single physical wire pair can be used to carry many simultaneous voice conversations, worldwide standards have been created and deployed. The European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) originally standardized the E-carrier system, which revised and improved the earlier American T-carrier technology, and this has now been adopted by the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T). This is now widely used in almost all countries outside the USA, Canada and Japan.

An E1 carrier operates over two separate sets of wires, usually twisted pair cable. A nominal 3 Volt peak signal is encoded with pulses using a method that avoids long periods without polarity changes. The line data rate is 2.048 Mbit/s (full duplex, i.e. 2.048 Mbit/s downstream and 2.048 Mbit/s upstream) which is split into 32 timeslots, each being allocated 8 bits in turn. Thus each timeslot sends and receives an 8-bit sample 8000 times per second (8 x 8000 x 32 = 2,048,000). This is ideal for voice telephone calls where the voice is sampled into an 8 bit number at that data rate and reconstructed at the other end. The timeslots are numbered from 0 to 31.

One timeslot (TS0) is reserved for framing purposes, and alternately transmits a fixed pattern. This allows the receiver to lock onto the start of each frame and match up each channel in turn. The standards allow for a full Cyclic Redundancy Check to be performed across all bits transmitted in each frame, to detect if the circuit is losing bits (information), but this is not always used.

E1 carries signals at 2 Mbps (32 channels at 64Kbps, with 2 channels reserved for signaling and controlling), versus the T1, which carries signals at 1.544 Mbps (24 channels at 64Kbps). E1 and T1 lines may be interconnected for international use.

Similar to the North American T-1, E1 is the European format for digital transmission.