2 Oct
2006
2 Oct
'06
9:01 a.m.
On 10/2/2006 at 11:17 AM der Mouse wrote:
POTS is a way of delivering the last mile for telephone
service. It
has no bearing whatever on routing calls between switches. (There was
a time when trunks between switches were many copper pairs. That time
is long, long gone.)
That's why I said "POTS model" :) There's a "Temple of Qwest"
consisting
of several very large boxes erected a couple of years ago on a concrete pad
that's located at a corner of my property here. It services heaven only
knows how many thousand pairs--in my case, "the last mile" is only about
400 ft. I get great DSL, yet the CO is somewhere around 7 wire miles
away--so I've got a pretty good idea of what's inside the temple.
No, my comment referred to the mechanism used to address individual
subscribers and the quaint hierarchy of country, area and local exchange
prefixes.
"Long long time" is relative. I recall that sections of Sunnyvale (in the
middle of Silicon Valley) north of El Camino were serviced by a type 2
crossbar switch well into the 80's. For me, that's recent history.
I still have the location of an old coaxial toll line marked by warning
signs nailed to old tree stumps for the "Pacific Telephone and Telegraph
Company" that crosses my property. Near the property line, there's an
access point where you can clearly see a pair of coaxial lines tie into a
terminal block. And the coax replaced an even older surface line--I can
still find glass insulators and bits of iron pole hardware in the soil aong
the route.
Cheers,
Chuck