The CCITT, considering that there is an urgent need to provide long-haul facilities mainly for nontelephony services (e.g. data, facsimile, visual telephony) for national use and for international interworking, and these non-telephony services need digital transmission at a low and medium bit rate (e.g. primary and secondary hierarchical levels); that long-haul digital links begin to be available, but that nevertheless the implementation of these facilities on a general basis will take some time.