Central Office
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ย. 2024
- Just a quick video of inside a working Central office.
A Central Office a is point where all voice and data come together within a zip code or area code.
Every city has a Central office that can be as small as a garden shed or as big a s a sky scraper (tandem office).
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Good to see the 5ESS. It was a sad day when the switch manager at Verizon told me all my experience in 11+ years at Sprint was worthless to him. Nice career, while it lasted.
50 yrs in CO best time of my life! Kudos to the techs.... decent frame wiring and fiber routing far better than in my area. Constant battle I was lucky to have almost total control of 3 COs and cud keep things neat.... easier to work on and less trouble for the customer. Thanks for the great tour!
Amazing that a CO still has the same look half a century later. I was a SxS, #5 frameman in the mid 60's. I am surprised there is no wall between the Batteries and the rest (corrosive vapor possibility) .
Wild man...what us old phreaks would have given to have access to this kind of info 30yrs ago
Very interesting sight was last in a CO in Dec '73 when my father retired after 37 years with Bell System. He worked in a number 5 crossbar (flat spring) from cut in on Nov 30, 1949 till retirement. The Co's sure look a lot different had motor generator sets charging batteries and a couple of mercury arc rectifiers for their coin pay phone collection. Communications Museum's number 5 exchange looks similar except I think theirs is the later wire spring relay type. Operating sound is quite different between the two. Have a neighbor that still has POTS and I have fiber with phone and internet. Voice connections are very clean, I call Burbank from Cleveland and the calls are sure different for years back. Great tour!
Believe it or not: London Underground are *still* using Mercury arc rectifiers to provide DC current! 🚇⚡😳
...And we British think we're _Levelling Up?!?!?_ 🏛🇬🇧🤣
brings back memories of my career as an ess/transport technician…loved working ln the equipment
This is how im connecting to youtube right now. So cool!
We still had step by step relays in the late 70's early 80's in Coquitlam BC Canada, so I was hoping to see some cross-bar switches in your video! Oh well, I guess contacts and pivot points eventually do wear out. The waveguide maze in your video was a treat to see!
We still had some of those here and working in the 90’s for the FAA. The place clicked all the time, you might recall.
@@pdbruce I don't know about clicking because I was only dumpster diving and looking into the windows, but one of the guys who worked there told me that he had to clean one step-by-step relay per day. That's a LOT of contacts to clean! No patience for that ;o)
Very nice video....Almost made me get ready for work tomorrow !! .....Retired bunch yrs ago after a 50 yr run in CO's....Most of that time pre-fiber Analog & digital Wireline to Weco TD-2 vacuum Tube waveguide microwave cxr technology....Brings back lots of good memories.....Thx for sharing....
They need to preserve the old equipment and donate it to the museum in Washington State
I used to see Bellcos sell or donate retired equipment to countries in South America. No idea if they still do that. There should be plenty of spare parts to keep things going considering the volume of equipment removed versus actually re-used.
The Connections Museum? Great place, well worth a trip.
Beautiful, I worked for USWest/Qwest in PDX for several years. and until Qwest (Qworst, Ride the Light baby) closed the office and I loved this job. maybe the only job in my entire 68 years of life I actually loved. I worked there until they closed the CO 22 years ago. (and no I never crammed a customer) I even had one of the largest sales in the entire USWest company on the consumer side, not small business. 27,000 on one call. I would have kept that job for life, not to be (nice thing is naccho spent some time in the big house for his misconduct ) I digress, Thank you for showing all the in and outs of the utility.
Really nice tour and nice CO! Very clean compared to what I’ve seen in some places. I’m in DMS land in Quebec Canada. Ahhh the sounds of those microwave links, RF black magic noises hehehehe.
I am a CO tech for a CLEC. I am also amazed seeing the old tecnology that still exist in some of the CO's. Thanks for the walk through tour. As someone who repaired TV's for 30 years, i appreciate old technology.
Thanks for this tour! It was like being back at work. I did several jobs at AT&T and CO work was by far my favorite.
Thank you so much for showing us the 'magic'.
Awesome tour! Thank you much!
I've been waiting for a central office tour!
Tip, pan slower, walk slower. You may not see it live, but walking fast and panning fast can cause motion sickness for the viewer. Great video, love the content.
Wow - I always remember hearing about the central switching office as a kid - freaking cool to see one!!
We can't decommission the 5E's fast enough! Working as fast as possible to put those out to pasture, or at least to an e-waste place. 👍🤠
Send a few over 'ere, will ya? We've still got some exchanges on SxS! 🏛🇬🇧🤣
Great tour of the CO!
Awesome videos.
Thank you for the tour. Love seeing clean CO’s. That location doesn’t look seismic rated :(
I started working in radio when I was 15 back in 1977. I was always fascinated with "dedicated broadcast loops". These were specially treated, high quality audio lines that radio stations used to send audio back and forth; usually sending audio from studio to transmitter. They were FM quality and were totally analog. I've never seen any videos about these services that could only be gotten through the local Telco.
I can still remember the circuit numbers of the lines my first radio station used to get audio from the studio to the transmitter. They were 56PTNA19644 (Left channel) and 56PTNA19645 (Right channel.).
Does anyone know how these high-quality "broadcast loops" worked?
Thanks for doing this project!
We've never once had a POTS outage, I would pay for it forever just to know that the gear is still up. I lose my fiber line constantly.
Excellent tour!!
Whoa, crazy they still use lead acid batteries in service!
Always will, some places tried to used VRLA or AGM (still lead acid)style like in the cell sites but they don't last the way they're used in Central offices. They only significantly discharge if the generators die. Otherwise they just keep the load supplied while the generators spool up. Pretty much every other chemistry wouldn't have many Ampere Hours after being treated like that for years. These tank cells can sit there for 50 years easy.
25 years after this style of battery(the round type though) were deployed, a study was done, 14,000 batteries (cells actually) were tested and inspected. None of them leaked, only .01% failed and the rest kept 80% of their capacity, which was a predicted number for 25 years in service.
There are new chemistry batteries, sure, but for this role, these are better than anything else.
Alcatel MDR-4000s, Sonet Microwave Radio. Full rack for 1 T/R. Today 1 T/R fits in 2 RU....
you didnt catch the western electric logos on some of those racks that is how old some of that stuff is
You haven't seen the _English Electric_ logos on half of the step-down transformers we've *still* got in service around these parts... ⚡🇬🇧😉
Great stuff, keep the videos coming!
I have been inside the Yosemite Valley, Fresno Main, and Clovis Main COs.
I want those battery cables
I want those batteries! 😍
Move over Mr. Musk with your UKCA 🔥 intertia-killing Li-Poo batteries...Pack a car with a load of these, and absolutely *nothing* is stopping you once you're above 40mph... 💥🐘💨😉
For what use?
@@Nords555 Traction drive/augmentation current supply (To move or assist the vehicle) and 💩-loads of weight to make you _unstoppable_ as soon as you're in motion! 🚂💨🤘
Nice Quantar in the rack behind you...which band? Commercial or ham?
That's awesome stuff!
awesome
How many PRI's on a card these days? T1's are obsolete? Any OPX or POTS circuits still around? Any DMS equipment since Nortel is gone?
4:40 Reminds me of the movie THX-1138
We need more pots lines not fiber optic and can you still get a pots line ?
Probably not, tbh: Openreach/BT are forcing all lines over to IP here by the end of 2025, several EU countries are now IP only, and the only way to get POTS on your phone line is to inherit (i.e: Move into a house with) a phone line that's still POTS. ☎
The thing is: IP is a _lot_ cheaper for carriers/networks to provision...So even in countries like the US where the right of choice is always there (Unlike us 🇬🇧 where they just force us over whether we like it or not) as soon as you're one of the last few on the POTs equipment, your phone bill is going so high even ransoming off Charles IIIrd won't pay for _all_ of it... 💸
where is the NSA equipment
😂 I worked in a CO very much like this for 16 years. I knew what every piece of hardware was for and I can say that any NSA equipment exists at a much more centralized location.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
It's behind the twitching curtains at your neighbours house... 👀💨😉
Oh, sorry...That's *our* approach to it, isn't it? 🕵🇬🇧🙃
I wonder if the Fibre stuff is the ASEoD and NMLI connections.
440 Ham radio repeater (Motorola QUANTAR) in your picture?
Arnt co supposed to not have glass direct entrance ? Cause of potential attacks ?
Not sure about attacks, but I was surprised at the glass door too. Never seen a CO with a glass door!
Alpha is a good brand !
I see some Quantars 😎
How much there is Nokia equipment in use in USA? Nokia used to make digital switchgear and such as DX200 from the late 70's and now of course 5G and such
4:36 would some of that be HDSL? I was a telco contractor for 15 yrs and went into many rural COs. I have a vague understanding of how the remotes were fed over copper from the bigger COs, but I don't know if HDSL is even used anymore for that.
I don't know how much of it is still out there, but pretty much any T1 over the last 20+ years was an HDSL circuit. (HDSL2 for the last one I had about a decade ago.)
Sweeet
Nortel is good
WAS good. Gone now, merged into Avaya years ago. Sad, they had great products.
Where is this CO located at?
Oh man...Much of that equipment is *beautiful!* Those microwave units sound just like the compressors on an MF-68! 🚇🔊❤🔥
And talking of compressors: I'm not completely _au-fait_ with CO hardware (And in my country our _Telephone exchanges_ are all powered by Tea! ☎🇬🇧🫖😉) but a compressor _for the lines?_ Is that being used to keep water out of trunks via positive air pressure, or is it for some other use? 😇
Nice to have finally found out where the other _non-retro_ PC with a floppy drive is located! 💾
Finally: Those batteries look heavy. as. F. If I had the means to collect a few once the POTS had been completely decommissioned and they were surplus to requirements, I'd want to build myself the most steamroller of an e-bike in history! 😁
how about dial up modems for the internet?
Almost no one has those anymore. Most of that stuff moved to "winmodems" two decades ago. (done in "software" on dense DSPs. DS3 worth of voice into a 2U box.) The last things I've seen still using dialup... gas pump credit card terminals. (and they mostly use cellular now)
Internet dial up modems belonged to the internet provider. We just dialled the number.
So you own this att co? What’s the deal here
No, he videoed during a tour, said it at the beginning.
Porno - billed at tier backbone level lol #po w USA ii
UsaII USA 2 USA II. #PO
Why do all US carriers suck?
For the LAST week i have had this video recommended by YT and i finally watched a few seconds and i hope that your videos do bot get recommended to me anymore, not your fault but it gets annoying after a while your videos get such a high ranking to be top, bye?
first
The PSTN is now obsolete.