PDH

Plesiochronous Digital Hierarchy: PDH (plesiochronous means nearly synchronous), was developed to carry digitized voice over twisted pair cabling more efficiently. This evolved into the North American, European, and Japanese Digital Hierarchies where only a discrete set of fixed rates is available, namely, nxDS0 (DS0 is a 64 kbps rate) and then the next levels in the respective multiplex hierarchies.