Circuit switching

Have you ever played with a walkie-talkie or a toy phone with your friends? When you use it, you pick it up and push a button to talk, and then your friend can hear you. Circuit switching works in a similar way, but with a lot more complicated stuff.

Imagine you and your friends are at a party and want to talk to each other. Before you can actually talk, you need to call your friend's phone, and when they pick up, you can start talking. This is like how circuit switching works.

When you make a call on a regular phone, the call has to be set up for you to talk. This happens through the use of wires and switches in the phone network called circuits. Just like how a switch has to be turned on for the toy phone to work, a circuit has to be turned on for a call to go through.

When you make a call, the phone network finds an available circuit to set up a path between your phone and your friend's phone. The circuit is like a dedicated path for your communication to go through. Your voice travels through this path, and once the call is over, the circuit is turned off.

Circuit switching was reliable because the path for the communication was consistently available, which ensured that the entire conversation could go through uninterrupted. However, it was also slow since an entire path had to be set up before communication could start. Nowadays, most phone networks use more modern methods of communication called packet switching, which is faster and effectively allows multiple conversations to happen at the same time.