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From: kitty!larry@uunet.uu.net (Larry Lippman)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Touring the Central Office
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Date: 13 Aug 89 14:50:21 GMT
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In article  john@zygot.uucp writes:
> Something that every reader of this group should do is take a tour of a
> local central office. I would kill for that opportunity now with all
> the advances in the past few years such as COSMOS, electronic
> switching, etc. But I never will forget the several times I toured
> local offices, both officially (with a public tour) and unofficially
> (with a friend who was a supervisor in the office).

	It is becoming extremely difficult for even an organized group
to tour a central office in any BOC area.  BOC's are particularly paranoid
(perhaps rightfully so) about outside people being in any central office.
There is virtually zero chance of any individual being afforded a tour of
a central office, unless it is, ahem, an "unauthorized" tour courtesy of a
friend (who may do so with considerable risk to their job).

	Independent operating telephone companies may be much more
accomodating, however.  Some independent telephone companies even encourage
customers to "see their wares".  As an example, the closet independent
telephone company in my area, Sanborn Telephone Co. (part of Iroquois
Telephone, which is part of the Continental System) has a large window
in their business office which looks out into the switchroom.  However,
Sanborn is a rather "small town" area with well under 4,000 telephone
subscribers.

	When's the last time you could pay your telephone bill and watch
the switchgear at the same time? :-)

> There was a room with a bunch of little odometer-like counters,
> thousands of them. While I was standing there, suddenly the lights went
> out, there was a flash, and then the lights came back on. They actually
> photographed the dials for traffic studies.

	For many years photographing message registers were the only
way to BILL subscribers for message rate service.

<>  Larry Lippman @ Recognition Research Corp. - Uniquex Corp. - Viatran Corp.
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