UK Telephones

[John Rouse]

In article , Alec writes

And have to buy new batteries every six months, oh, that phone's no longer made so there are no spare batteries.

J.

[Dave Liquorice]

Not actually legal, spares have to be available for n years after a product has ceased manufacture. I think 5 < n > 10.

[G&M]

Not necessarily. There is an assumed timespan of roughly what you quote but automotive manufacturers are looking for an EU wide waiver on electronic assemblies in their cars as otherwise there will be so many units to stock they'll have no hope.

[Jerry.]

In other words they want to make 3 year old cars obsolete, or as soon as possible there after....

If they gat away with their wish there will be no hope for us all I expect !

[G&M]

Well they want to not supply spares some years after last manufacture. Problem is a long run like the Focus can go through umpteen designs of incompatible ECUs which mostly don't die but obviously occasionally one will. Their hope is that ones can be recycled from crashed cars.

[Jerry.]

So a firmware update and a car made last week might well not run on the new firmware, let alone one made three years ago. As for ECU's dieing, they do, and more often than they should IMO (other faults can kill them). As for salvaging units form crashed cars, that might still happen when the manufacturer is responsible for the recycling of their products but due to the need to test / repair the unit I suspect PC boards etc. will just got for breaking down and the recycling of component material IYSWIM.

[Martin Angove]

Well it may not be "best practice", but it can make the wiring easier :-)

I had seven "PABX masters" attached to the main BT master at our last house, five or six phones and a modem and never any problems.

The other thing is that I've seen a few ADSL microfilters - the plug in sort - which have only a two-wire connection to the plug and therefore have ringing capacitors built in. You could quite easily have several of these, effectively master sockets, even on a system wired conventionally.

And to risk opening old (several weeks ago) arguments, I recently wired a house which ended up with five master modules after the BT master, three ADSL filters (they already had them so I didn't fit a centralised filter) and (after sorting a problem with the modules themselves) no problem with either the phone or ADSL.

Hwyl!

M.

[BillV]

Well I went to 3 scrapyards get a part for an old car recently ... all 6 cars I could find of the same model had been in head-on crashes and there was nothing useable in the engine compartments... So this idea seems a non-starter to me.

[Pete C]

Hi,

Often ECU's are under the front seat, so they got that one right! Why they can't standardise on boxes and connectors like they have for PC's, instead of changing them once a fortnight I don't know...

cheers, Pete.

[G&M]

Especially since most are designed by just a couple of companies such as Bosch. But each car manufacturer insists on a new box for each new model.

[Dave Plowman]

Trouble is the things the 'engine' ECU communicates with vary so much between cars - so having common plugs would lead to all sorts of problems

- remember many sensors around a car are still analogue.

[geoff]

In message , G&M writes

It wouldn't be a problem if they were more reliable ...