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Where to find exchange information / general infrastructure?

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    #2
    musically challenged
    Closed Accounts Posts: 16 ✭musically challenged


    Hi,
    You might get the information from Commreg but, you're best option is to make friends with the local eircom man/woman - they will know all the cable feeds to the branch exchanges.

    Generally a good jumping off point to understand the technologies is:
    Wikipedia - search for telephone exchanges and there will be links to transmission methods also.


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    #3
    Solair
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,230 ✭✭✭Solair


    The vast majority of them are connected with fibre with a microwave backup link should the fibre be damaged / broken. In urban areas, they're usually connected by multiple fibre routes to other near by exchanges and to the main hub in the area. Since the rollout of MANs and other networks there are even more fibres available at most exchanges than there would have been even a few years ago. The microwave links would most likely only support voice/ISDN traffic. You'd need quite a lot more capacity for decent broadband.

    The microwave network became less essential and more of a back up in the 1990s as data traffic increased and fibre became essential.

    Eircom have significant duct networks that connect up all those rural exchanges so they're quite capable of quietly upgrading to fibre.

    A lot of the duct network was laid back in the P&T era and carried coaxial cables so it was just replaced by pushing fibres down ducts.

    As areas switch over to NGB, the exchanges are moving towards using an "all-IP" network so they can make much more efficient use of the existing fibre. Older exchange equipment used 1980s digital transmission technologies over fibre which is much less efficient than IP.

    Ultimately, the voice and data traffic can all go down the one IP connection over fibre (or microwave) much more efficiently. Your local PSTN (voice) / ISDN telephone exchange is converted to IP backhaul. You notice no difference as an end user, but your calls are actually going back over carrier-grade VoIP using MPLS (Multi-protocol label switching) which tags each packet with a priority so that voice / ISDN traffic flows smoothly.


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