I grew up in a small town of 2700 people. At the edge of the downtown area stands a telephone building that I would estimate at 5000 sqare feet. I have been in the building three times in my life. the first was in 1969 when it was jam packed full of switches and equipment. One wall still held the original operators switchboard (out of service since the late 1940's), but looking ready to go back into service at any time. I remember watching the switches work and thinking they were like music The second time was in about 1990. The operator switchboards were gone, and the building had around a dozen relay racks (each the size of a large refrigerator) in the center. It was neat and clean and the racks were prominent in a basically empty building. The most recent time I was in the building was in 2007 and the building was full of crap! Ladders, boxes, empty spools and just general junk. I was unable to determine where the magic was happening. I strongly suspect the whole town was being run from the shiny green metal box about the size of a large refrigerator that was in front of the building. Today, that green box is gone, and a new one has sprung up on the edge of town on the main road. I strongly suspect the phone company building is abandoned. Now I live 30 miles away. Four blocks away from my house is a Bell system building that is huge! It is two stories tall, and probably 20 to 30,000 square feet in size (perhaps larger). There are never any trucks or cars in front of it. I wonder if anything is inside.
My guess is that the building was built in the days of mechanical switching systems that took up all that space. With modern packet switching (as stated in this video), now it probably is in the back corner of that building, just humming away.
I was fortunate enough to have a rotary phone plugged in just...3 years ago give or take. Only on a landline network does it work. Everytime I used it to make a call, I would have to dial in twice. I'd get the dial tone, I'd dial, nothing, hang up, picked up, got the dial tone, DIALED (physically) and it would go through. I tried to imagine the machine in whatever building that had to warm up after never being used just to route my call by listening to the old dial pulses. There's just something about it I rather love imagining.
As a person who has worked in IT pretty much all my life, I hate the answer the rest is going to be "in the cloud" with "much smaller footprint" it could be the same footprint... we don't know because we contracted someone else to do it.
*"...Working in IT..."* Is not the same as working in a CATV headend or Telco switch. The _shrinkage_ in rack space and power consumption is huge as the technologies combine and move to IP solutions
This reminds me of those stories grandpa told me about how he used to walk uphill 10 miles in 3 feet of snow while barefoot on the way to school and way home from school all before he had to plow the fields, milk the cows and feed the chickens before he got to play hide and seek with his friends..
I remember taking a computer system out of a bank building decades ago it was their data center for the area, it ran a massive 240 V power and had water cooling yes it had water cooling it was such a giant beast it got replaced by something that sat on a desktop basically and this thing filled the basement of this bank branch
I can remember working in replacing PanAm’s PBX4 at Heathrow airport. When we’d finished what used to fill a room then, now just occupied a desk ! Many memories from so long ago.....
I used to program the main phone system which covered Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports and BAA's management offices. We had loads of interconnects to airlines phone systems. It was about 18,000 extensions when i left just on the main system.
"We ***think*** the SL-100 was installed around 1991" That's kinda sad that no one has official logs on installing a tandem PBX. I find it interesting that they would use an SL-100 for 6000 lines. SL100s were maxed to 100k. "There was no Plan B". Well that was kinda silly to have if you have SL100 PBX then there should've been some redundancy. It's like buying a BMW and not having enough cash to get spare parts when it breaks down. That was a bad analogy, but efficiencies are a bit concerning. And didn't SL-100 mean "Stored Logic"? Good luck to the cloud and 10Us servers because it's not if but when a DDOS busies out the lines...
36 years isn't a long time in the world of telecom. I imagine those lines emerged as regular analog carrier and was connected to many smaller PBXes. I wonder what took over while they were taking this one offline.
I worked for NORTEL Networks for over 18 years, mostly on the SL100, DMS250, DMS300. The first SL100 that I worked on had over 30,000 phone lines. I also worked one of the first DMS100 VOIP. I still know Big Brother can type a few commands and hear you talking even on the so called cloud. Oh, NORTEL closed their doors in 2009, questionable the largest manufactory in North America.
It was always a source of pride for us living in Brampton that Nortel had their headquarters here. An impressively large building now occupied by Rogers. 30,000 phone lines sounds amazing, I think our largest NortelBCM deployment was 2 PRIs lol. The BCMs were amazing in their simplicity and for the most part were quite reliable, I'm amazed to see so many still in use today.
I was on the enterprise side with the SL an M1 product line. The writing was on the wall when the went voip and virtualize the server. Happy to be in cybersecurity space these days
I remember in the 70's and early 80's when you called someone and you could hear other people's conversation on the phone. Sometimes is what about people you knew! The analog lines fusion together and you could hear everybody's conversations.
Crosstalk. The very reason that Adsl lines were ASYMMETRIC digital subscriber lines, cause the exchange end is very noisy and needed a larger part of the spectrum, ie, download speed was higher than the upload speed.
@@toysareforboys1 Of course, I grew up on a farm in Africa where we had party lines. The phones had a hand crank and calling someone on the same line as yourself meant you had to pulse out the right string of long and short rings using the crank. By that point (early 80s) we already had a semi-automatic exchange. One long ring would connect you with the "mainline" exchange and you could make a call out. This was still an actual human being doing the connection. By the 90s we had a "Magnolia" phone. It was still a party line, but it had some trickery so that the other phones were blocked when one was active, thereby ensuring you could no longer listen in. Finally, the telecoms company moved to a Wi-Max setup with VOIP phones, and it is still like that for most of rural Namibia :-)
In the 80’s (I was a 9 y/o kid then) we shared a multi-home party line in Leander, Texas. I remember constantly having to wait for a pair of teenage lovebirds who hogged the line constantly to end their calls before I could call my friends. I finally dealt with it by recording one of their racier conversations onto a cassette and threatening to play it to their parents if they didn’t let me use the phone. I told them I had the equipment to easily patch their parents into their phone call any time I wanted, which I didn’t, but since I was able to record them without introducing clicks onto the line by unhooking the handset mic they probably figured I could. I was able to make calls any time I wanted after that.
Not really. If you heard in the video it says they had to install 400 switches around the campus, so it's more like 410U, just not in the same room. This is because VoIP calls have two layers of switching. One is the network layer, where the network knows where each telephone is and moves voice and data between phones in the shortest path possible, but it does not know about phone numbers, only phone IPs (think of them as network numbers) The second is the control layer, the one he is referring to as 10U. This is the actual PBX which keeps track of the associations between phone IP and actual phone number and does all sorts of checks and controls to see if you are allowed to call the other number. It never received any actual audio, it only tells the phones where the phone they wish to connect to is, and they call eachother on their own. It only keeps track of how long the call was and when it terminates so it knows the two phones are now free and callable by others As for why the 400 new switches are not in that room, ethernet can only travel up to 100 metres, but even if it could go as far as a pots like what would you prefer, running 17000 wires from the same room or running two (for redundancy) to each comms room and then 48 wires from there to the phones nearby?
I used to work on a similar system - Nortel's Meridian Option 81c. I miss that thing sometimes! We had a brand new system next to (working) cabinets that were originally installed in 1976.
@exboisv I worked on an Option 61c for the company it supported. It was 2 cabinets wide and 4 shelves tall, so not as big as the 81c, but still a beast to me. Had about 600 digital lines (mostly 3904/3905s, some 2616), 100 analog for Polycoms and fax machines. 6 PRIs to the PSTN. Handled multiple call centers and and back office workers in the building. I spent many hours in the manuals getting the thing to sing the way I wanted. logi, ld 20, prt, tnb, 28 0 8 1, ****, logo. Was replaced by a 2U Cisco Call Manager server and handsets.
Looks very similar to a DMS actually. We still have lot of those running throughout my company. DMS200, DMS100, DMS10 and even some 1Us. Kinda makes me sad to slowly see them go though, but they are pretty old tech. The stepper switches are before my time but my office is pretty much in the same room it would have been in back in the day.
Sort Of Brings Back Memories To Me. Worked Industrial Maintenance (Controls) For Many Years. Modules Shown Were In Some Of The Machines I Had To Work On (Mid-80s To Mid 90's CNC Machine Centers/Plastic Injection Molding/Container Printers). Before My Time When I Started Maintenance/Repair, But Documentation For The Equipment Was Absolutely The Best. No Secrets Like New Machines Today.
I worked for a telephone co for 32 years and when I retired they were installing new systems digital AVAYA,I just to work in the switching rooms with lines and PBX.
Most of our phone systems, landline and cellular are now IP based telephony. So your landline connected to a copper wire. Will have server on the Telcos central exchange or data center routing your calls.
@AkshonClips Well that happens a lot during natural disasters. That’s why you need to prep and get a ham license. Just in case phone communication lines goes out.
It 100% is the best idea for critical systems to have it in redundant remote locations across the country. This isnt dropbox, why are so many uneducated people thumbing you up? Yikes.
The oldest 1.1 I ever worked in was at the Beverly Hills hotel, the last time I was there was in 98 or so, still cross connecting to posts with a wire wrap tool, good times. Aloha
@@diceman199 Yeah we use Krone strips too, they are more convenient but not superior to wrapping posts, seen loads of Krones go noisy but hardly ever seen a wire wrapped post go noisy
@@harryjohnson615 They also allow for a denser termination set up. We used to get quite a lot of faults on the wire wrap installs i looked after. Mostly because there's a bit of a knack to doing them right where krone is much easier. I had to fix a noisy krone connection a few weeks ago though
The problem with hosting any portion of this in the cloud is that when it breaks, you have no course of action other than to call somebody up and complain. Hard to do if your call routing is down.
@1701gijoe Yes, I do understand how these things work. I started in telephony back in the 90s working on Definity systems. All of the redundant cloud structure in the world can be rendered useless by other single points of failure, and there are always those somewhere. Whether it's a fiber bundle getting whacked by a backhoe, or something like a DNS lookup failure, once you abstract your infrastructure into the cloud, many things become beyond your control. This move has no doubt added stability in many ways that didn't exist before, but it also adds the mystery 'black box' of the cloud and so there are now risks that are opaque and unknown. Not sure if that's a great idea for an emergency response system, if that's what's involved. These sorts of moves are trade-offs. You have to balance the risk/reward ratio carefully. A lot of people assume cloud services are 'always up' because of some seven nines figures given by providers. It usually is not true.
@@cody1648 One of the best of the overpriced contenders, yes. It works great, and is reliable, but the price-per-features ratio is awful, and there are much better choices. (Even though Cisco support is great, but man do you pay for it.)
"Plan B is too expensive." -- often said by bean counters who don't understand the economic impact of losing capital equipment to water damage and the lost productivity of an extended outage. Convergence is a thing. There's no longer a need for POTS lines in bulk. VoIP is a reality as you don't need a different service path. I'd have a few POTS lines as emergency for the main and security desks but there's no need for PRIs any longer.
How can any government plan be too expensive? It's tax diollars! BTW, I studied the POTS devised in 1934 while an EE student in the early 1980s, it was a required! It is an incredible feat of electrical and mechanical engineering. Look how long it was in service. And look at the reliability. It was extremely rare you picked up any phone and didn't get a dial tone. The details they investigated, like why the system is run on -48volts with a positive ground. Reason was electrolysis would eat the metal conduit into the switching center where they could be replaced versus towards the ground where they were buried. Does any one think the internet is built on that level of thought and engineering. Sorry, it's not. I can't log into LinkedIN again today and this has been going on since February 23, almost a month now!
@@andydelle4509 different technology with different problems. the last POTS line I had was maybe 20 years ago, provided by a small local company still using old analog hardware. the main hardware is probably great, but the problems are usually in the lines between there and the endpoint. the wires up on telephone poles in the rain and the wind. always intermittent problems, difficult to track down, so goes unfixed. as interesting as the old analog hardware is, it's very much a good thing it goes away.
@@andydelle4509 What does the fact you can't log into linkedin have to do with the Internet infrastructure at large? I'm a simple residential customer and the last time I had an internet outage was more than a year ago, and it only lasted for like half an hour.
@@demoniack81My point is that modern IT engineering discipline is lax and not to the standards of the old telephone company. I was using the now month old LinkedIn issues as an example. I come from an engineering background to when you have a critical system fail, it's 24/7 on rotating crews until it's fixed. A few years ago my wife complained about significant office IT problems on a Thursday. I asked how thing were the following Monday - the same. Then she said "Oh, they don't work weekends". So they botch a software upgrade and don't think to come in on a weekend where they have unlimited systems access to work on it? Electrical/Computer Engineering is a far more structured and demanding profession than Information Technology.
@@andydelle4509 Clearly someone decided that those systems weren't as important as you think. There are plenty of IT systems that are online 24/7 with almost zero downtime.
And how many have a plan B for the cloud? Managers scream blue murder if trade drops a few percent, but don't care about 100% loss if they loose their favourite web services. Crazy
the "cloud" really is just someone elses computers. out of sight out of mind. it can still go down, but then you don't have physical access to it yourself, you're forced to rely on some other company someplace.
@@lorenzo42p I work in IT and I will say there are many benefits to hosting in a contracted out data center "cloud" - However yes they can have downtime, however they issues typically effect such a large scale that the issues are resolved within an hour or 2 at most. That and you as the customer need to do about zero troubleshooting. Simply wait for services to be restored. I suppose service teams who work for the providers have the biggest headaches lol.
dont retire the phone system. continue using the phone system until it keels over of old age. you are on the phone then static and the call gets cut off and you try to call them back and the phone is dead.
How does the cloud burn down? There are multiple redundant datacenters that make up the cloud. Anything is better than this monstrosity, and it's a miracle it was never taken out by something simple like a broken water pipe or fire
I've seen entire data centre floors taken down because a moronic sparkle blew up the distribution board. This old installation might look secure but a single building is highly vulnerable
OVH one of Europe's largest cloud providers had a data center burn down in Strasbourg, France. The backup servers were hosted in the same data center, many businesses lost data permanently
It’s just the way things are going. It’s more cost effective and easier to maintain. Only a handful of buffs could probably build a system so intricate using that same tech today. They’ll save heaps in reliability and maintenance alone
@@judaspreistvlct dark age is voip, where everything you say passes through a foregin country, when on a normal landline it goes from a to b (copper and fiber)
Yes a rats nest under water pipes is such an upgrade to a distributed VOIP system. Everyone talking about DDoS has no idea what they are even talking about and wants to feel smart using tech words their kids mentioned.
what a downgrade, from a bomb proof tech to a unreliable hacker teen hackable system, also wonder how much donwtime it will have and how unsafe it will be to have data on foregin servers
@@mindfulape8763 i dont mean that, i mean why would you trust something that goes onto some foregin servers over something that is reliable and goes from a to b without internet or servers in middle and even works in a state wide outage? i guess you never used landline of course you dont know why is better
@@stvpls > Why would I trust something that goes through foreign servers Are you aware that you can often pick the location of your servers? Use encryption if you're worried. > That even works in a state-wide outage Uptime is a part of contracts with ISPs and Datacenters. They have multiple redundant internet connections, load balancing, and power sources. I've used both landline and VOIP systems. VOIP systems are a lot easier to manage.
Google Enterprise could have done that for a fraction of the cost. This is a prime example of incompetent government employees costing taxpayers millions upon millions of dollars through wasteful spending.
They are being phased out as physical copper wire with analog signal but landlines still exist, they are either VDSL over copper or fiber. You can't run a government agency on mobile phones
@@icovada They are installing fiber here everywhere, even the smallest towns. They give HGW-s to the end user which have PSTN port and bridges it as VoIP. But fiber optic computer network is usually not centralized, not as much as old PSTN network. It does not need these big switching centers anymore. A cabinet at the corner of a street handles whole blocks or small towns.
@@bend1119 Definitely. But thats the minority of usage I guess. Average people (majority of companies included) pretty much use mobile phones exclusively. In the current form, it is more logical to install a VoIP gateway with PBX at subscriber's building.
![ROSÉ(로제) - APT. (Band VER.) (With. 이영지) [더 시즌즈-이영지의 레인보우] | KBS 241129 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/IW8qaemx74g/mqdefault.jpg)
It’s always amazing to walk into an old telecom building and see several floors of switches removed and everything running into one rack.
Cloud is stupid
@@aedgvv6095 Cloud will be future. With failover Datacenters the cloud is way safer than that old System.
@@analphabet1996 in terms of stabilty and restorability - yes. in terms of security - no
I grew up in a small town of 2700 people. At the edge of the downtown area stands a telephone building that I would estimate at 5000 sqare feet. I have been in the building three times in my life. the first was in 1969 when it was jam packed full of switches and equipment. One wall still held the original operators switchboard (out of service since the late 1940's), but looking ready to go back into service at any time. I remember watching the switches work and thinking they were like music
The second time was in about 1990. The operator switchboards were gone, and the building had around a dozen relay racks (each the size of a large refrigerator) in the center. It was neat and clean and the racks were prominent in a basically empty building.
The most recent time I was in the building was in 2007 and the building was full of crap! Ladders, boxes, empty spools and just general junk. I was unable to determine where the magic was happening. I strongly suspect the whole town was being run from the shiny green metal box about the size of a large refrigerator that was in front of the building.
Today, that green box is gone, and a new one has sprung up on the edge of town on the main road. I strongly suspect the phone company building is abandoned.
Now I live 30 miles away. Four blocks away from my house is a Bell system building that is huge! It is two stories tall, and probably 20 to 30,000 square feet in size (perhaps larger). There are never any trucks or cars in front of it. I wonder if anything is inside.
My guess is that the building was built in the days of mechanical switching systems that took up all that space. With modern packet switching (as stated in this video), now it probably is in the back corner of that building, just humming away.
Great story thanks yeah all the stuff is shrinking and going away, just like phone lines and wire it’s all going wireless.
I was fortunate enough to have a rotary phone plugged in just...3 years ago give or take. Only on a landline network does it work. Everytime I used it to make a call, I would have to dial in twice. I'd get the dial tone, I'd dial, nothing, hang up, picked up, got the dial tone, DIALED (physically) and it would go through. I tried to imagine the machine in whatever building that had to warm up after never being used just to route my call by listening to the old dial pulses. There's just something about it I rather love imagining.
Thats a really cool tale! Where can i find pictures of this place?
Probably an NSA listening post 😁
As a person who has worked in IT pretty much all my life, I hate the answer the rest is going to be "in the cloud" with "much smaller footprint" it could be the same footprint... we don't know because we contracted someone else to do it.
I think you're expecting a lot from a press release made for normals.
The cloud is just someone else's computer(s).
*"...Working in IT..."* Is not the same as working in a CATV headend or Telco switch. The _shrinkage_ in rack space and power consumption is huge as the technologies combine and move to IP solutions
Yup. Exactly. It's still running on physical machines somewhere, it doesn't magically fit into smaller space just because it's in "the cloud"....
@@plonkster ... for all we know that cloud is in India! (thank you tech support)
This reminds me of those stories grandpa told me about how he used to walk uphill 10 miles in 3 feet of snow while barefoot on the way to school and way home from school all before he had to plow the fields, milk the cows and feed the chickens before he got to play hide and seek with his friends..
Why would an old man play hide and seek?
Lookup what was in cough syrup back then
Took me a minute to realize this wasn't the Washington DC capitol, was wondering why they mentioned Tulsa lol
I remember taking a computer system out of a bank building decades ago it was their data center for the area, it ran a massive 240 V power and had water cooling yes it had water cooling it was such a giant beast it got replaced by something that sat on a desktop basically and this thing filled the basement of this bank branch
I can remember working in replacing PanAm’s PBX4 at Heathrow airport. When we’d finished what used to fill a room then, now just occupied a desk !
Many memories from so long ago.....
I used to program the main phone system which covered Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports and BAA's management offices. We had loads of interconnects to airlines phone systems. It was about 18,000 extensions when i left just on the main system.
"We ***think*** the SL-100 was installed around 1991" That's kinda sad that no one has official logs on installing a tandem PBX. I find it interesting that they would use an SL-100 for 6000 lines. SL100s were maxed to 100k.
"There was no Plan B". Well that was kinda silly to have if you have SL100 PBX then there should've been some redundancy. It's like buying a BMW and not having enough cash to get spare parts when it breaks down. That was a bad analogy, but efficiencies are a bit concerning.
And didn't SL-100 mean "Stored Logic"?
Good luck to the cloud and 10Us servers because it's not if but when a DDOS busies out the lines...
Cloudflare coming in clutch
BMW spare parts can cost more than the car after you reach item #3 on the list, at least in the states. BMW owners in this country are morons.
Northern telecom sl100, yes in the end of 80's, hi from Algeria
@0:58 "signal link 1"
@@Bdoserror Someone at that OES agency is wrong. It was well known it was Stored Logic
36 years isn't a long time in the world of telecom. I imagine those lines emerged as regular analog carrier and was connected to many smaller PBXes. I wonder what took over while they were taking this one offline.
PDH and SDH were king and still going strong particularly SDH
I worked for NORTEL Networks for over 18 years, mostly on the SL100, DMS250, DMS300. The first SL100 that I worked on had over 30,000 phone lines. I also worked one of the first DMS100 VOIP. I still know Big Brother can type a few commands and hear you talking even on the so called cloud. Oh, NORTEL closed their doors in 2009, questionable the largest manufactory in North America.
It was always a source of pride for us living in Brampton that Nortel had their headquarters here. An impressively large building now occupied by Rogers. 30,000 phone lines sounds amazing, I think our largest NortelBCM deployment was 2 PRIs lol. The BCMs were amazing in their simplicity and for the most part were quite reliable, I'm amazed to see so many still in use today.
I was on the enterprise side with the SL an M1 product line. The writing was on the wall when the went voip and virtualize the server. Happy to be in cybersecurity space these days
I remember in the 70's and early 80's when you called someone and you could hear other people's conversation on the phone. Sometimes is what about people you knew! The analog lines fusion together and you could hear everybody's conversations.
Crosstalk. The very reason that Adsl lines were ASYMMETRIC digital subscriber lines, cause the exchange end is very noisy and needed a larger part of the spectrum, ie, download speed was higher than the upload speed.
@@plonkster Or party lines. Some rural addresses actually only shared one pair between multiple houses ;)
@@toysareforboys1 Of course, I grew up on a farm in Africa where we had party lines. The phones had a hand crank and calling someone on the same line as yourself meant you had to pulse out the right string of long and short rings using the crank. By that point (early 80s) we already had a semi-automatic exchange. One long ring would connect you with the "mainline" exchange and you could make a call out. This was still an actual human being doing the connection.
By the 90s we had a "Magnolia" phone. It was still a party line, but it had some trickery so that the other phones were blocked when one was active, thereby ensuring you could no longer listen in.
Finally, the telecoms company moved to a Wi-Max setup with VOIP phones, and it is still like that for most of rural Namibia :-)
In the 80’s (I was a 9 y/o kid then) we shared a multi-home party line in Leander, Texas. I remember constantly having to wait for a pair of teenage lovebirds who hogged the line constantly to end their calls before I could call my friends. I finally dealt with it by recording one of their racier conversations onto a cassette and threatening to play it to their parents if they didn’t let me use the phone. I told them I had the equipment to easily patch their parents into their phone call any time I wanted, which I didn’t, but since I was able to record them without introducing clicks onto the line by unhooking the handset mic they probably figured I could. I was able to make calls any time I wanted after that.
@@DanielGBenesScienceShows Lol I kind of want to know if you still have that tape?
Entire room in a 10U rack mount cabinet? Wow!
You could do that all in a 1U server with VoIP. 2U if you want redundancy.
Not really. If you heard in the video it says they had to install 400 switches around the campus, so it's more like 410U, just not in the same room.
This is because VoIP calls have two layers of switching. One is the network layer, where the network knows where each telephone is and moves voice and data between phones in the shortest path possible, but it does not know about phone numbers, only phone IPs (think of them as network numbers)
The second is the control layer, the one he is referring to as 10U. This is the actual PBX which keeps track of the associations between phone IP and actual phone number and does all sorts of checks and controls to see if you are allowed to call the other number.
It never received any actual audio, it only tells the phones where the phone they wish to connect to is, and they call eachother on their own. It only keeps track of how long the call was and when it terminates so it knows the two phones are now free and callable by others
As for why the 400 new switches are not in that room, ethernet can only travel up to 100 metres, but even if it could go as far as a pots like what would you prefer, running 17000 wires from the same room or running two (for redundancy) to each comms room and then 48 wires from there to the phones nearby?
@@gorak9000 not for 20000 phones and not in a serious environment. You want more redundancy than two.
@@icovada I know who to contact when I have questions regarding land based telephony. :)
U?
I used to work on a similar system - Nortel's Meridian Option 81c. I miss that thing sometimes! We had a brand new system next to (working) cabinets that were originally installed in 1976.
Was the 1976 system digital?
@@gregorymalchuk272 Yes. The old SL1 system. We upgraded it in 1995 but still used the old cabinets as we had a mix of Nortel 2616 and SL1 phones.
Oh how I would love to have a nortel phone system
@@bcm50 Actually, Ebay has a lot of Option 11s
@exboisv I worked on an Option 61c for the company it supported. It was 2 cabinets wide and 4 shelves tall, so not as big as the 81c, but still a beast to me. Had about 600 digital lines (mostly 3904/3905s, some 2616), 100 analog for Polycoms and fax machines. 6 PRIs to the PSTN. Handled multiple call centers and and back office workers in the building. I spent many hours in the manuals getting the thing to sing the way I wanted. logi, ld 20, prt, tnb, 28 0 8 1, ****, logo.
Was replaced by a 2U Cisco Call Manager server and handsets.
Looks very similar to a DMS actually. We still have lot of those running throughout my company. DMS200, DMS100, DMS10 and even some 1Us. Kinda makes me sad to slowly see them go though, but they are pretty old tech. The stepper switches are before my time but my office is pretty much in the same room it would have been in back in the day.
Sort Of Brings Back Memories To Me. Worked Industrial Maintenance (Controls) For Many Years. Modules Shown Were In Some Of The Machines I Had To Work On (Mid-80s To Mid 90's CNC Machine Centers/Plastic Injection Molding/Container Printers). Before My Time When I Started Maintenance/Repair, But Documentation For The Equipment Was Absolutely The Best. No Secrets Like New Machines Today.
I just replaced a DMS-10 with a pair of 1U servers. Part of me feels bad about it, end of an era...
I worked for a telephone co for 32 years and when I retired they were installing new systems digital AVAYA,I just to work in the switching rooms with lines and PBX.
Voice over IP is truly an incredible piece of technology.
"Out there in the cloud" :) well not the best idea for critical system IMHO
Most of our phone systems, landline and cellular are now IP based telephony. So your landline connected to a copper wire. Will have server on the Telcos central exchange or data center routing your calls.
@AkshonClips Well that happens a lot during natural disasters. That’s why you need to prep and get a ham license. Just in case phone communication lines goes out.
It 100% is the best idea for critical systems to have it in redundant remote locations across the country. This isnt dropbox, why are so many uneducated people thumbing you up? Yikes.
Miss the old Nortel DMS. Still have my old Helmsman cds.
My first phone number was only three digits long, in a small Village in the UK back in 1970
Ok guys so now you wont have a stable system ...
The oldest 1.1 I ever worked in was at the Beverly Hills hotel, the last time I was there was in 98 or so, still cross connecting to posts with a wire wrap tool, good times. Aloha
I still have a wire wrap tool somewhere :-)
@@diceman199 We still wire wrap between posts 😁
@@harryjohnson615 Krone strip jumpers is the closest i get to that now
@@diceman199 Yeah we use Krone strips too, they are more convenient but not superior to wrapping posts, seen loads of Krones go noisy but hardly ever seen a wire wrapped post go noisy
@@harryjohnson615 They also allow for a denser termination set up.
We used to get quite a lot of faults on the wire wrap installs i looked after. Mostly because there's a bit of a knack to doing them right where krone is much easier.
I had to fix a noisy krone connection a few weeks ago though
The problem with hosting any portion of this in the cloud is that when it breaks, you have no course of action other than to call somebody up and complain. Hard to do if your call routing is down.
While I mostly agree with you... Last time I checked, must of us have a cell phone in our pocket to call the company to say your system is down.
@@niceatrya3477 Yes, that's true I was being silly to make a point.
@1701gijoe Yes, I do understand how these things work. I started in telephony back in the 90s working on Definity systems. All of the redundant cloud structure in the world can be rendered useless by other single points of failure, and there are always those somewhere. Whether it's a fiber bundle getting whacked by a backhoe, or something like a DNS lookup failure, once you abstract your infrastructure into the cloud, many things become beyond your control. This move has no doubt added stability in many ways that didn't exist before, but it also adds the mystery 'black box' of the cloud and so there are now risks that are opaque and unknown. Not sure if that's a great idea for an emergency response system, if that's what's involved. These sorts of moves are trade-offs. You have to balance the risk/reward ratio carefully. A lot of people assume cloud services are 'always up' because of some seven nines figures given by providers. It usually is not true.
Is the new system Cisco Unified Communications Manager by any chance?
Very likely… I still don’t understand why they put in their own exchange in the 90’s… at least they will get the cisco hold music
Maybe they will have 3CX.
CUCM 🤮
@@ruhnet cant deny it's one of the best.
@@cody1648 One of the best of the overpriced contenders, yes. It works great, and is reliable, but the price-per-features ratio is awful, and there are much better choices. (Even though Cisco support is great, but man do you pay for it.)
I’m technician for a very old school copper phone company. Sadly I recognize some of those old systems.
"Plan B is too expensive." -- often said by bean counters who don't understand the economic impact of losing capital equipment to water damage and the lost productivity of an extended outage.
Convergence is a thing. There's no longer a need for POTS lines in bulk. VoIP is a reality as you don't need a different service path. I'd have a few POTS lines as emergency for the main and security desks but there's no need for PRIs any longer.
How can any government plan be too expensive? It's tax diollars! BTW, I studied the POTS devised in 1934 while an EE student in the early 1980s, it was a required! It is an incredible feat of electrical and mechanical engineering. Look how long it was in service. And look at the reliability. It was extremely rare you picked up any phone and didn't get a dial tone. The details they investigated, like why the system is run on -48volts with a positive ground. Reason was electrolysis would eat the metal conduit into the switching center where they could be replaced versus towards the ground where they were buried. Does any one think the internet is built on that level of thought and engineering. Sorry, it's not. I can't log into LinkedIN again today and this has been going on since February 23, almost a month now!
@@andydelle4509 different technology with different problems. the last POTS line I had was maybe 20 years ago, provided by a small local company still using old analog hardware. the main hardware is probably great, but the problems are usually in the lines between there and the endpoint. the wires up on telephone poles in the rain and the wind. always intermittent problems, difficult to track down, so goes unfixed. as interesting as the old analog hardware is, it's very much a good thing it goes away.
@@andydelle4509 What does the fact you can't log into linkedin have to do with the Internet infrastructure at large? I'm a simple residential customer and the last time I had an internet outage was more than a year ago, and it only lasted for like half an hour.
@@demoniack81My point is that modern IT engineering discipline is lax and not to the standards of the old telephone company. I was using the now month old LinkedIn issues as an example. I come from an engineering background to when you have a critical system fail, it's 24/7 on rotating crews until it's fixed. A few years ago my wife complained about significant office IT problems on a Thursday. I asked how thing were the following Monday - the same. Then she said "Oh, they don't work weekends". So they botch a software upgrade and don't think to come in on a weekend where they have unlimited systems access to work on it? Electrical/Computer Engineering is a far more structured and demanding profession than Information Technology.
@@andydelle4509 Clearly someone decided that those systems weren't as important as you think.
There are plenty of IT systems that are online 24/7 with almost zero downtime.
Nice Juniper MX104 with dual routing engines and the 10G ports license
Running a wholes states phones in 10U rack. :-)
Everything is going to the cloud, but is the cloud going to the cloud?
And how many have a plan B for the cloud?
Managers scream blue murder if trade drops a few percent, but don't care about 100% loss if they loose their favourite web services. Crazy
the "cloud" really is just someone elses computers. out of sight out of mind. it can still go down, but then you don't have physical access to it yourself, you're forced to rely on some other company someplace.
@@lorenzo42p I work in IT and I will say there are many benefits to hosting in a contracted out data center "cloud" - However yes they can have downtime, however they issues typically effect such a large scale that the issues are resolved within an hour or 2 at most. That and you as the customer need to do about zero troubleshooting. Simply wait for services to be restored. I suppose service teams who work for the providers have the biggest headaches lol.
@@TechMaxWare Tell that to the teams working in ovh's SBG2 room...
@@mryo-yobzh9485 OVH ain't Azure lol
Have equipment from Nortel, Centrex equipment and k60
When your state runs on aws
aws > this rats nest under water pipes
1U is 1.75" of the rack space.
I miss step offices...
Plenty of buildings still use those, lots of pairs there....tag em
dont retire the phone system. continue using the phone system until it keels over of old age.
you are on the phone then static and the call gets cut off and you try to call them back and the phone is dead.
Who are you even talking to
@@Paultimate7 suggesting not to retire the phone system just like i suggest that people shouldnt retire.
What about redundancy?
So what happens when the cloud burns down? Or a fibre link is broken? (nevertheless is great having a chance to witness such a great move)
How does the cloud burn down? There are multiple redundant datacenters that make up the cloud. Anything is better than this monstrosity, and it's a miracle it was never taken out by something simple like a broken water pipe or fire
@@jsncrso Well, part of OVH literally burn down some days ago.
I've seen entire data centre floors taken down because a moronic sparkle blew up the distribution board. This old installation might look secure but a single building is highly vulnerable
OVH one of Europe's largest cloud providers had a data center burn down in Strasbourg, France. The backup servers were hosted in the same data center, many businesses lost data permanently
why is this still a thing in 2017?
one word: government
What a downgrade
It’s just the way things are going. It’s more cost effective and easier to maintain. Only a handful of buffs could probably build a system so intricate using that same tech today. They’ll save heaps in reliability and maintenance alone
Yap but make them selfs vounrable to all kind misschief by a handfull of blokes that are up to no good its the I in VOIP thats the issue
@@judaspreistvlct very bad grammar (sorry english is not my primary language and will sometimes have some funny typo's)
@@judaspreistvlct dark age is voip, where everything you say passes through a foregin country, when on a normal landline it goes from a to b (copper and fiber)
Yes a rats nest under water pipes is such an upgrade to a distributed VOIP system. Everyone talking about DDoS has no idea what they are even talking about and wants to feel smart using tech words their kids mentioned.
Some time the old ways are best...
what a downgrade, from a bomb proof tech to a unreliable hacker teen hackable system, also wonder how much donwtime it will have and how unsafe it will be to have data on foregin servers
Kevin Mitnick
If you think this is bomb proof, you should read up on recent events in Nashville TN.
Yeah I bet you think covered wagons are the most reliable form of transportation too
@@mindfulape8763 i dont mean that, i mean why would you trust something that goes onto some foregin servers over something that is reliable and goes from a to b without internet or servers in middle and even works in a state wide outage?
i guess you never used landline of course you dont know why is better
@@stvpls
> Why would I trust something that goes through foreign servers
Are you aware that you can often pick the location of your servers? Use encryption if you're worried.
> That even works in a state-wide outage
Uptime is a part of contracts with ISPs and Datacenters. They have multiple redundant internet connections, load balancing, and power sources.
I've used both landline and VOIP systems. VOIP systems are a lot easier to manage.
Magnetic tape in 1991. wow..
Can I buy the old SL-100? :) Hmm, this is 4 years old. I will assume it's in some China scrapyard by now :(
I’m sure the SL is out there
@@99sporttruck there's a lot DMS switches in our network still. The o ne I have in my town is still running its old processor from 1982.
Before ip phone service
rest in pieces
much smaller footprint, much easier to hack.....
Said the person that has zero idea about any of this on a technical level.
Can I have it?
Google Enterprise could have done that for a fraction of the cost. This is a prime example of incompetent government employees costing taxpayers millions upon millions of dollars through wasteful spending.
lolwut?
While in Europe, most telecoms phase out landlines as no one really needs them anymore.
They are being phased out as physical copper wire with analog signal but landlines still exist, they are either VDSL over copper or fiber.
You can't run a government agency on mobile phones
@@icovada They are installing fiber here everywhere, even the smallest towns. They give HGW-s to the end user which have PSTN port and bridges it as VoIP. But fiber optic computer network is usually not centralized, not as much as old PSTN network. It does not need these big switching centers anymore. A cabinet at the corner of a street handles whole blocks or small towns.
I'm pretty sure your government offices still have land lines for every desk.
@@bend1119 Definitely. But thats the minority of usage I guess. Average people (majority of companies included) pretty much use mobile phones exclusively. In the current form, it is more logical to install a VoIP gateway with PBX at subscriber's building.
TECHNICIAN ATTEMPTING TO IMPRESS FEMALE OF THE SPECIES 1:29
No wonder China is so far ahead of us, with 1/3rd the cost.
On the cloud so Jeff Besos can listen in.
17000 lines ? That SL100 is just a PABX.
You mistake the SL100 for the DMS100/500.