A class of Telco services, called SILS (Signaling-Intensive Local Service), is defined; its provisioning and impact on ISDN/BISDN switching systems are analyzed in qualitative terms. SILS can be characterized by three basic attributes: service locality, real time performance, and intensive signaling over a user-network interface (UNI). Typical examples of SILS are CO(central office)-switched TV services (COTV), CO-based LAN, and CO-based file server services. Although current deployments of SILS are based on specialized equipment and proprietary interfaces, the synergy in the B-ISDN developments is to support all services, including SILS, over a single standard B-ISDN interface. To meet its real time performance requirement, efficient handling of SILS-related signaling must be implemented. In the study, we considered three architectures for SILS provisioning, namely, base unit switching, remote unit switching, and hybrid switching. These architectures are evaluated in terms of equipment complexity, SILS response time, and the effect on other services. To highlight the key tradeoffs, a case study for COTV sercice is performed for these architectures based on different functional partitioning between B-ISDN base unit and remotes. A simulation study is performed to quantify the service interaction between the COTV service and narrow-band service. The study concludes that: 1. (1) Centralized processing of SILS-related signaling is more efficient than remote processing, if SILS signaling is not explicitly differentiated from other signaling over the B-ISDN UNI. This conclusion is based on considerations given to equipment complexity and overall service performance. 2. (2) To make remote processing attractive, B-ISDN UNI standards should fully decouple SILS-related signaling from other signaling and user information traffic. Due to the above conclusions, we recommend that the future B-ISDN user-network signaling scheme should provide efficient remote signaling extraction mechanism for specialized services like SILS. Such a mechanism is essential for a cost-effective implementation of SILS in both base- and remote-switched architectures.