Catonic wrote:
Ok, so it's TelCove. This is a video of a tour of a Central Office (CO).

That's a pretty good overview of a newer CO. Most Bell operated CO's don't look like that. Imagine what something like that would've looked like in 1971 and you get a better idea. Especially if it's a rural CO. They're more like missile silos. Ironically, most of the visuals seem to show data gear, rather than PSTN gear. I laughed out loud when they showed the 5ESS. You don't really get an appreciation for the size of that installation. There's probably several rows behind that row of cabinets to support the 30K switched circuits. Like 6-8 rows. That could be completely replaced with about 3 bays of Asterisk gear at something like 1/100 of the cost.

They didn't show the most impressive part of a CO, and I suspect that's because this office is probably all fiber fed. But for an older office or a main & toll office, there's literally thousands of copper loop terminating on these giant punchdown panels that get routed all through the office. When the loops come in large bundle sets (200+ lines), they are encased in these gas discharge canisters to keep the copper fresh and fumes from killing people. There's also these gigantic lightning arrestors that the punchdown blocks are connected to with massive grounding stakes.

It's amazing to me how quickly this has all changed though. In early 1999, I put the first Cisco device that had ever set foot in BellSouth's Nashville Main & Toll CO in service. It took 4 months to get them to agree to have it co-located because it wasn't NEBS compliant. I'd be willing to bet that there's more Cisco gear in that building now than there is all other vendors combined.

RE: Telephone Company Tour - Google Video