# Class-4 telephone switch
A class-4 telephone switch is a toll or transit switch in the public switched telephone network that connects trunks (dedicated phone lines connecting telephone switches) to trunks, routing long-distance traffic between local class-5 end offices rather than serving subscribers directly. In the North American switching hierarchy, class-4 offices were the ordinary toll switches, the most numerous tier below class-3 primary, class-2 sectional, and class-1 regional centers.[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/) • [2](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Function | Trunk-to-trunk toll/transit switching between class-5 end offices; no attached subscribers, no dial or ringing tones[2](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching) |
| Hierarchy position | Class 4 (ordinary toll) below class 3 (primary), class 2 (sectional), and class 1 (regional) centers[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/) |
| Classic equipment | Western Electric No. 4 crossbar, first installed in Philadelphia in 1943; No. 4A with card translator from 1950[3](https://ethw.org/Electromechanical_Telephone-Switching) |
| Digital successor | No. 4 ESS, first placed in service January 17, 1976 in Chicago; 107,520 trunks and over 500,000 calls per hour[4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1994.tb00624.x) |
| Scale in 1983 | 718 toll offices (classes 1 through 4) in the Bell System versus 9,780 class-5 local offices; 65% of toll offices still electromechanical[2](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching) |
| Modern form | Class 4 softswitch controlling trunking gateways over H.248/Megaco, with ISUP, INAP, and SIP signaling interfaces[5](https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-d/opb/hdb/D-HDB-IPT-2004-R1-PDF-E.pdf) |
## Role in the toll hierarchy
The North American long-distance network was built as a hierarchy of toll offices. A local office is a class-5 end office; above it stood class-4 toll centers, class-3 primary centers, class-2 sectional centers, and class-1 regional centers.[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/) • [2](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching) The hierarchy existed because a flat network would require too many direct trunks between every pair of offices; routing through a hierarchy of nodes used trunking far more efficiently, and each pass through an office degraded call quality somewhat, so minimizing the number of hops mattered.[2](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching)
A toll office differs from a local office in what it omits. It has no attached subscribers, no need for dial or ringing tones, and no ringing power; it is purely a trunk-to-trunk router. Selecting the ideal outbound trunk, possibly from several thousand, was the complex part of its work.[2](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching) In a typical routed call, a local office forwarded all ten dialed digits to a toll office, which either found a direct trunk to the destination area or passed the call to a higher-level office; an office with a direct trunk to the destination area would drop the three-digit area code and forward only the seven-digit local number.[2](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching)
Class-4 offices could in principle be built from panel, step-by-step, crossbar, or electronic switching equipment; each office class did not dictate a particular machine type.[6](https://www.calling315.com/crossbar-family-tree) In practice, the [Bell System](https://www.edgepedia.org/bell-system)'s toll backbone came to be dominated by the No. 4 crossbar family and then by the No. 4 ESS.
## The No. 4 crossbar era
Development of toll crossbar began well before deployment. Four-wire crossbar switching for toll was first proposed in 1935, development of a cordless switchboard toll system started in 1936 on a 2-wire basis, and by 1938 transmission studies justified the added cost of 4-wire working, so the direction changed to 4-wire. The number 3 was skipped to avoid confusion with the existing No. 3 toll switchboard, and the system became the No. 4 crossbar.[7](https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/document-repository/catalogs-manuals/bell-system-we/history-books-1/11365-btl-history-switching-technology-1982-opt-r/file)
The first No. 4 crossbar was installed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1943, and four more followed in other metropolitan areas over the next five years. It was the first automatic switch in the long-distance network, replacing connections that had previously required operators at manual long-distance switchboards.[3](https://ethw.org/Electromechanical_Telephone-Switching) The Bell System introduced these machines in the 1940s to prepare for semi-automated Nationwide Operator Toll Dialing in the late 1940s and for fully customer-dialed Direct Distance Dialing (DDD) through the 1950s and 1960s.[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/)
**The card translator.** Customer-dialed long distance required the switch to translate an area code and exchange prefix into a route code. The No. 4 crossbar gained a device called the card translator for this purpose, and [Western Electric](https://www.edgepedia.org/western-electric) named the modified design the No. 4A crossbar, first installed in [Albany, New York](https://www.edgepedia.org/albany-new-york) in 1950. The 182nd and last Bell System No. 4A went into [Madison, Wisconsin](https://www.edgepedia.org/madison-wisconsin) in 1976; twenty additional No. 4A machines were installed by independent United States companies and in Alaska and Canada.[3](https://ethw.org/Electromechanical_Telephone-Switching) Counting all variants, 202 No. 4-type crossbar toll machines were installed in the DDD network, and all were in actual use during most of 1976: 182 in the US Bell System, 4 at Bell Canada, 5 at other Canadian carriers, 10 at independent US telephone companies, and 1 in Hawaii.[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/)
At the end of 1976, the DDD network within class 1 to class 4 levels was served by 183 Bell System No. 4 crossbar offices, a figure covering every one of the ten regional centers and nearly all sectional centers; of these, only 19 lacked the 4A/ETS configuration.[8](https://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V57N02_197802.pdf) The Electronic Translator System (ETS), introduced in 1969, used stored-program control to perform route translation and network management, greatly reducing the equipment investment and administrative costs of those functions.[8](https://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V57N02_197802.pdf)
## Signaling and the move to CCIS
No. 4A offices originally signaled each other with multi-frequency (MF) keypulse tones over the voice paths. A 1960 Bell System Technical Journal article describing this signaling system gave at least one reader a way in: the description of how the machines talked to each other in tones underpinned the "blue box" phreaking devices that emitted the tones to seize toll trunks.[9](https://spectrum.ieee.org/phreaking-out-ma-bell)
The replacement was Common Channel Interoffice Signaling (CCIS), which separated signaling from voice trunks. Converting No. 4 offices equipped with ETS was judged vital to rapid CCIS introduction, and Bell planned to retrofit CCIS into about half of the 4A/ETS offices to speed the DDD network's conversion from SF/MF signaling, gaining reduced signaling costs, faster call setup, and new services.[8](https://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V57N02_197802.pdf) CCIS began replacing MF keypulse signaling between No. 4A offices in 1976, though not all machines were converted before retirement; some unconverted machines used their ETS as a CCIS signal transfer point for other CCIS-enabled switches.[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/)
## The No. 4 ESS and the end of the hierarchy
The digital successor, No. 4 ESS, was described by [Bell Labs](https://www.edgepedia.org/bell-labs) as a high-capacity toll and tandem switching system and the largest single system development the Bell System had undertaken; it was also the vehicle by which electronic switching first entered the Bell System long-distance network.[10](https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/publications-and-media/publications/no-4-ess-prologue/) The first [4ESS switch](https://www.edgepedia.org/4ess-switch) was placed into service on January 17, 1976 in Chicago. When it debuted, no digital switch with a higher capacity existed anywhere: the system could handle 107,520 trunks and process more than 500,000 calls every hour.[4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1994.tb00624.x) Notably, the first 4ESS was installed in January 1976, before the last No. 4A crossbar in Madison, Wisconsin in May 1976, so the two technologies overlapped briefly.[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/)
The 4ESS played what its developers called a pivotal role in enabling the emerging US long-distance market to grow into a $60 billion industry over the following 18 years, and its classic digital switch architecture persisted while every major subsystem received technology upgrades.[4](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1994.tb00624.x) New 4ESS installations replaced the older 4A/4M crossbar machines from late 1976 through the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the last No. 4-type crossbar toll machines were retired by the late 1980s or early 1990s.[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/)
The hierarchy itself did not survive either. By the mid-1980s the class ranking of toll switches had become meaningless after the introduction of Dynamic Non-Hierarchical Routing (DNHR), which let the network route calls without a fixed ladder of regional, sectional, and primary centers.[1](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/) The class-4 function, however, remained: a census of Bell System toll switching in January 1983 counted 718 toll offices of classes 1 through 4 against 9,780 class-5 local offices, with 65 percent of toll offices still electromechanical at that late date.[2](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching)
## The class-4 softswitch
The term class 4 outlived the electromechanical and early digital machines. In voice-over-packet networks, a class-4 softswitch performs the same function as a class-4 toll/transit exchange, with similar features such as screening and routing and signaling interfaces including ISUP and INAP; it controls external trunking gateways that convert TDM voice to packets using the H.248 (Megaco) protocol.[5](https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-d/opb/hdb/D-HDB-IPT-2004-R1-PDF-E.pdf) Indian technical standards likewise apply a separate requirements section to softswitches used for transit (class 4) applications, which control trunk media gateways over H.248 and signal with CCS7, SIGTRAN, H.323, and SIP.[11](https://tec.gov.in/pdf/GR2/TEC-GR-SW-LTS-001-02-FEB-13.pdf)
## References
1. [History of the Number 4 Crossbar (#4XB) Tandem Switch, Telephone World](https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/)
2. [Overview of Toll Switching, Vintage Telephone Systems](https://www.calling315.com/overview-of-toll-switching)
3. [Electromechanical Telephone-Switching, Engineering and Technology History Wiki](https://ethw.org/Electromechanical_Telephone-Switching)
4. [Anderson, Carestia, Foster, and Meyers (1994). The Evolution of the 4ESS Switch. AT&T Technical Journal 73: 93-100.](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1994.tb00624.x)
5. [The Essential Report on IP Telephony, ITU-D (2004)](https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-d/opb/hdb/D-HDB-IPT-2004-R1-PDF-E.pdf)
6. [Crossbar Family Tree, Vintage Telephone Systems](https://www.calling315.com/crossbar-family-tree)
7. [A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Switching Technology (1982), TCI Library](https://www.telephonecollectors.info/index.php/browse/document-repository/catalogs-manuals/bell-system-we/history-books-1/11365-btl-history-switching-technology-1982-opt-r/file)
8. [Crawford, Funk, Miller, and Sipes (1978). Common Channel Interoffice Signaling: 4A Toll Crossbar Application. Bell System Technical Journal 57(2).](https://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V57N02_197802.pdf)
9. [Phreaking Out Ma Bell, IEEE Spectrum](https://spectrum.ieee.org/phreaking-out-ma-bell)
10. [Spencer, A. E., Jr. (1977). No. 4 ESS: Prologue. Bell System Technical Journal, Nokia Bell Labs publication page.](https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/publications-and-media/publications/no-4-ess-prologue/)
11. [TEC Generic Requirements for Softswitch used for Transit (Class 4) Applications, Telecommunication Engineering Centre, India](https://tec.gov.in/pdf/GR2/TEC-GR-SW-LTS-001-02-FEB-13.pdf)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Communications and everyday technology › Telephony systems and services › Switching and exchanges › Automatic exchange systems › Exchange office classes and hierarchy*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 15, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026 · Last review: Oct 15, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license