What model SLC? If they're new enough to be labelled Lucent instead
of AT&T, they may not be representative of the bulk of installed
plant.
I wouldn't be surprised to find a lot of things being done for new
installations are a lot different from what they used to be. For
example, when SLCs were fed with copper Ts, it was a significant cost
savings to run them with only 2 Ts plus a spare. When the Ts are on
fiber, it might actually be cheaper to run them all with 4 Ts plus
spare and have only a single model of termination card for which to
inventory spares.
Fiber markedly changes the cost comparison between switching calls
locally with a lot of small switches vs. trunking them to large
central switches. If you were building the phone system from scratch,
you might have only one big switch per lata, with fiber to a lot of
large and small SLCs terminating the local copper.
With ISDN and frame being backhauled to a few large switches, Bell
Atlantic is already moving in the direction of turning local switches
into glorified SLCs. Remove the switching smarts from a low-end model
of the 5ESS line and you have a SLC with really good POTS cards ...
-- Dick St.Peters, stpeters@NetHeaven.com Gatekeeper, NetHeaven, Saratoga Springs, NY, 1-800-910-6671 (voice) Saratoga/Albany/Amsterdam/BlueMountain/BoltonLanding/Cobleskill/ Greenwich/GlensFalls/LakePlacid/NorthCreek/Plattsburgh/... Oldest Internet service based in the 518 area code - To unsubscribe, email 'majordomo@livingston.com' with 'unsubscribe portmaster-users' in the body of the message. Searchable list archive: <URL:http://www.livingston.com/Tech/archive/>