One type of bus that is enormously important to today's users is the network connection, and that is virtually always serial due to the high cost of telephone connections. In fact, there is only one wire and all the control, address and data functions take their turn on this one wire! How do the two ends of a network wire, be it a telephone line or coaxial cable on an Ethernet LAN, know when a data value is being transmitted instead of a control or address value? Basically, bit patterns on the one wire are recognized and then decoded into a packet, or a time-sequence of bit patterns that put all the control, address and data information into their proper time slots.