Eircom technical standards

cregmon

Anyone here know what technical standards Eircom use, if at all, for their equipment rooms and exchanges? I'm trying to find out why their engineers keep having to do loop back tests to locate our landline at their own exchange. Seemingly no-one writes anything down anymore and I've also been told that the cabling there is in a mess. So I'm not sure if they've abandoned good practices or if they can be audited against something like TIA-606 or other ISO/IEC specs.

I'd like to see if I can get more rope to tie them up with.:D

Ta very much.

irishkopite 2011

cregmon wrote: »

Anyone here know what technical standards Eircom use, if at all, for their equipment rooms and exchanges? I'm trying to find out why their engineers keep having to do loop back tests to locate our landline at their own exchange.

I'd like to see if I can get more rope to tie them up with.:D

Ta very much.

They would know where your line is in the exchange but they wouldn't know which one that it is in the network as there are alot of joints between an exchange and your house, some joints would have 200pairs in them.
They do have a set of their own standards, which they created, somewhere.

AutoTuning

Landline telephone networks are all like that. Pairs are usually found by testing and the wiring on the distribution frames, junctions etc is similarly complex.

That’s nothing unique to Eir or Irish networks. They’re done like that all over the world. They’re very old wiring systems that evolved and grew over decades and have been connected to everything from mid 20th century electromechanical exchanges, to electronic and early digital voice switches, to ISDN, ADSL and now VDSL. The same wiring has been reused, extended and expanded for decades, especially in big urban exchanges.

Eir’s practices would be pretty similar to any PSTN network around Europe and probably follow old CEPT and present day ETSI norms.

Things will become a lot more streamlined with pure fibre networks as the whole topology becomes much less complex.

wexfordman2

WHITE Blue orange green brown grey...rinse, repeat...RED blue orange green brown grey, rinse repeat..can't remember what's next, too far back :-)

NewClareman

irishkopite 2011 wrote: »

They would know where your line is in the exchange but they wouldn't know which one that it is in the network as there are alot of joints between an exchange and your house, some joints would have 200pairs in them.

The cable records should show how the service is cross-connected at each joint. The installer/technician then has to follow the colour coding to identify that exact pair, at a particular joint. Loop-back tests are used to confirm that the correct pair has been identified.

wexfordman2 wrote: »

WHITE Blue orange green brown grey...rinse, repeat...RED blue orange green brown grey, rinse repeat..can't remember what's next, too far back :-)

Dear god, worked on them as a trainee. So very long ago, sigh...

AutoTuning

Interesting, I see Eir recently notified ComReg of their intent to withdraw basic rate ISDN services by 2024.
It looks like the equipment no longer exists to maintain them or even source terminal adapters anymore.

The Ericsson AXE & Nokia (Alcatel) E10 switches that provide the dial tones and landline voice services and ISDN are being replaced by VoIP based MSANs, but ISDN won’t be supported. They’re just maintaining aspects of them for the remaining ISDN users until 2024.

It will maintain basic phone services over copper into the future, to the degree that most people who still have a landline won’t notice any change at all, and the main switching nodes and core network are moving to Ericsson and Nokia soft switches.

I’d say they’ll have shifted most people onto direct VoIP over VDSL broadband or fibre anyway and plenty of people no longer bother with landlines at all.

However, it looks like curtains for the traditional TDM based phone network within a few years. Hardly anyone will notice though and landlines will still work. However, the underlying technology will be all IP based and a lot less complicated - generic servers and software applications instead of specialist hardware and voice traffic just being IP data.

Main thing is if you’ve an old office phone system or some more obscure reason for still using ISDN in 2020, might be a good time to consider moving on to modern tech.

NewClareman

AutoTuning wrote: »

...However, it looks like curtains for the traditional TDM based phone network within a few years. Hardly anyone will notice though and landlines will still work. However, the underlying technology will be all IP based and a lot less complicated - generic servers and software applications instead of specialist hardware and voice traffic just being IP data...

It's been a long time coming. The reality is that ip-based services are the future. I guess the TDM training simulation I got built is now obsolete. Still, it was MANY years ago.

AutoTuning

NewClareman wrote: »

It's been a long time coming. The reality is that ip-based services are the future. I guess the TDM training simulation I got built is now obsolete. Still, it was MANY years ago.

Technology moves on. Eir’s actually a relative laggard when it comes to making the move to VoIP compared to many of their EU counterparts, although they’ll likely finish the switchover sooner than some. The number of people moving to direct VoIP or using broadband only is growing very quickly, so ultimately they’ll have traditional copper phone services retained with far less equipment and smaller MSANs, probably just supporting a legacy customer base who won’t or can’t change to VoIP.

A lot of telcos got a bit lost in a trap of trying to replicate the full PSTN and had spent a lot of money on it, but the bottom fell out of demand as mobiles became cheap enough to use and VoIP bypassing the PSTN entirely became much easier to do just though your router.

L1011

AutoTuning wrote: »

Interesting, I see Eir recently notified ComReg of their intent to withdraw basic rate ISDN services by 2024.
It looks like the equipment no longer exists to maintain them or even source terminal adapters anymore.

They managed to change supplier of terminal adapters a few years ago - surprised they didn't just order enough to see them out. Prior to the new supplier they started reusing the Siemens ones and looking for them back for once.

One major source of repeat BRI installs income - broadcasters - has been killed by IP codecs; and I'd be fairly certain the last few months of broadcasters getting used to Zoom and equivalents will make the kind of person who has an ISDN line + codec at home for radio contribs - politicians, celebs etc - serious reconsider the recurrent cost.

AutoTuning

The core issue is the hardware at the other end of the line is obsolete and likely unsupported by vendors. You can't really preserve and life extend decades old equipment forever. They are specifically saying they can't source terminal adaptors anymore, but do have enough to see them out, which is 2024.

https://www.comreg.ie/publication/eircoms-request-to-withdraw-access-to-integrated-services-digital-network-isdn-basic-rate-access-bra

3 years of notice is pretty reasonable. If end users can't find alternatives, most of which are vastly superior and cheaper, in that time frame, there's not much anyone can do. It's hardly a surprise to anyone any more than Telex being turned off.

It's also nothing unusual. The plug is being pulled on the technology right across Europe and around the world.