Frontier POTS (2025 Update)

A K snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote

Don’t forget what that did to the cat.

How big is the building ?

Varys with how old it is. I doubt you lot have much SxS technology in use still. If its more recent than that its likely crossbar. If its quite modern it could well be a proper digital system.

Could be a RIM or CMUX too if its quite recent.

Forget what you lot call yours.

That’s very typical with the smaller ones.

Central station? The exchange?

Usually a Switching Office.

The place where all land lines join up to the phone network. I had a tour of one back in the late 70s. They had step by step, crossbar and computer switches all in one building. They all did the same thing, picked an outgoing wire to connect your phone to.

They had a big room full of lead acid batteries too.

Commonly known in the US as a "Central Office", here is more info than you might care to know ;-)

And it consists of a 5ESS switch or similar and a lot of batteries and/or a generator to keep the the phones working during power outages.

Archaic Telephone & Telegraph replaced the local 5ESS with 6Meg Slow-Verse LSI.

It's better than dialup but Comcast is ten times faster for the same money.

Depends on how big it is. None of ours have no windows, because they were all built in the crossbar days and crossbars did require quite a bit of maintenance so has staff working in the building most days, hence the windows. We also have plenty of much smaller ones which are the size of a big shed and those didn’t have people working there most days and those generally have no windows. Those smaller ones arent COs.

The ones added later than the crossbar days were all much smaller, no bigger than a small car tho generally higher than a car and thinner. The earlier ones are mostly RIMs, the later ones could be CMUXes,

Hmmmm. I always wondered about that!