![]() View Footprint In: ArcGIS Online Map Viewer I can easily believe that this is typical of a small modern BT exchange.View In: ArcGIS JavaScript ArcGIS Online Map Viewer ArcGIS Earth ArcMap ArcGIS Pro The GPO bought prime real-estate in the centers of towns and cities and built exchanges big enough to accommodate a hundred years of growth, then technology meant that 90% of that space wasn't needed. Many exchanges were built in the 60's and 70's when electro-mechanical exchanges were the norm. This is why many British exchanges are far bigger than they need to be, and far tidier than they might be expected to be. "They're closing it" he said, the new equipment meant so few people were needed to maintain the exchange that the canteen was no longer viable, and it wasn't many years before my Dad was one of those who were no longer needed. A fifth of the whole exchange, more than 1000 square feet of equipment, condensed down to just a few.įinally he took me up to the canteen for the last time. Then he took me up to the fourth floor, where the new System-X cabinets were and said "this whole floor used to be like the last one, it's all now been replaced by those two cabinets there". He used to take me to work to see the old Strowger switches running and one time he took me in to show me something new he'd been working on.įirst he showed me the third floor, with row after row of these amazing little machines going chugga-chugga, ra-ta-ta-tat and even pointed out the uniselector for our home phone. Advertisementīack in the 70's and 80's my father worked for the GPO (General Post Office) and then British Telecom. To left of those are the ADSL blocks, which would then be connected to the aforementioned DSLAMs. The Openreach engineer points out some ISDN blocks and DACS blocks (an old tech that multiplexed multiple phone lines over a single twisted pair). The side nearest the wall is the D-side (distribution side) where external telephone lines first enter the system the backside of the MDF is the E-side (exchange side), where the telephone lines are then fed into various pieces of equipment. The second half of the room features the main distribution frame (MDF). We don't know exactly what's in there, but it's probably a bunch of third-party-owned DSLAMs (digital subscriber line access multiplexers) from the ADSL providers that operate in the area (Sky, TalkTalk, etc.) If you want to mentally fill in some of the gaps, .uk has a few photos from 2008 that give you a rough idea. The first half of the room mostly consists of equipment hidden inside cabinets. ![]() (An area code on one of the printed signs suggests the exchange is somewhere in Bedfordshire.) ![]() Sadly we don't know the location of the exchange, but judging by the size of the car park outside, the building presumably houses more than just an exchange. Unlike a data centre, though, natural light floods in through some windows (I expected more security, really). It looks like a server room, or perhaps even a small data centre, with very few exposed wires and some nice overhead ducting. The first thing you'll notice is just how tidy the room is. This is somewhat unusual: there are low-res photos of telephone exchanges online, and some historical illustrations of telephone exchanges for educational purposes, but a high-res walkthrough of an active exchange is quite rare. Click and drag to move the camera.īT's Openreach infrastructure division, which will soon escape from the BT mothership with some 32,000 employees under its twisted copper arms and form a separate company, has released a 360-degree walkthrough video of a modern telephone exchange.
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