Abstract: A telephone central office switching network and a basic switching element utilized therein is disclosed herein. The basic switch element has the capability of reflecting traffic entering any of the inlets thereto back to any other traffic inlet and the capability of connecting any of the inlets thereto to any of the outlets therefrom. The basic switch is implemented in the network incorporating the reflection technique, sometimes called a one-sided network in which the outlet from a switching stage is in a preferred embodiment connected to a higher order switching stage such that the outlets of the switching stages are progressively connected in a multistage configuration from the terminal stage into the folding point in increasing order, thereby enabling the outlets of the higher order stages to be used as reflection ports while simultaneously remaining available for connection to higher order switching stages without the necessity of recabling.