old round dial phones repaired?

Get yourself one of these:



Any Irish hardware store stocks them.

Connect the phone to the Red and Green terminals

Then plug a standard phone cord into the other side, and plug it into the eircom socket

and voila! you're connected.

Actually, if it's an English telephone it will possibly have 3, wires not 2, so can't be directly connected to an Irish line as it won't ring.

You need to get a BT to RJ11 (Irish) adaptor WITH a capacitor, these are similarly sized to a DSL filter.

You'll also need a British phone cord! Not sure where you'll get that...

Cut the BT phone cord and connect the wires to the telephone -
http://www.telephonesuk.co.uk/wiring_info.htm explains the UK system.
You need to connect the A, B and Bell wire. I'm not sure how you will identify which is which, but trial and error may work nicely!

You could use one of those phone sockets (above) as a junction box, they're quite useful.

Then plug the BT line cord into the adaptor and plug that into the eircom socket and you should get somewhere!

eircom / telecom eireann sockets are backwards compatible with the 3-wire phone system as it was used on some dial phones here too in the past. You must use a Telecom Eireann or Eircom beige or white main socket, not a self-installed extension socket as these do not have the required circuitry for the 3rd wire ring.

If you open your eircom socket you will find 3 terminals labelled as follows:

• L1
• L2
• R

Get some CAT5 or decent grade telephone cable and make connections to those 3 terminals.
Then get a junction box and connect them to the phone's horseshoe / lug connectors. (Ensure you use the extension connections, do not connect to the same side as the phone line coming in!)

I wouldn't suggest that you wire anything other than CAT5 type cable to an eircom socket as you will damage the terminals. Some of them are "Krone" or "IDC" punch-down connectors, which require a little tool that you can pick up in Maplins you basically put the cable (without paring off the insulation) into the connector, and press it in. The terminal has blades inside it which slice the insulation and make the connection. You MUST use solid copper network cable though i.e CAT5 otherwise the insulation doesn't cut. Stranded cable is no use either.

If they are screw-type connectors, ensure that you remove about 1cm or so of insulation and loop it under the screw's flat plate and tighten carefully. Ensure that you don't unnecessarily expose bare cable i.e. keep it so that the exposed part is under the screw.

On older eircom phone sockets, your line comes in on 2 terminals L1 and L2 at the top (R is not connected) and your extensions wire to L1 and L2 on the other side. (R is left unconnected).

On newer (white) eircom sockets, you remove 2 screws from the front and you will find terminals (Screw type) on the back of the face plate for connecting your extensions.

Just wire the phone as follows:

A -L1
B - L2
Ringer - R

I am not sure which cable colours on your old phone will correspond to each connection so, you may need to try various combinations.

The website above seems to suggest

A (L1)- White
B (L2)- Red
Ringer (R) - Blue

If you pick up the phone and get a dial tone, you've got L1 and L2 identified.
If the phone fails to ring, you may have confused L2 and R.
If L1 and L2 are swapped, it can cause UK phones to ring continiously! So, just swap back

Basically just test that the phone a) gives a dial tone and b) rings.

a modern phone line (digitally switched) will still understand the dial pulses from a phone from that era.

Irish phones are much less complicated from a wiring perspective. From the 1970s onwards P&T/Telecom Eireann adopted US/Canadian style wiring i.e. 2-wire. It doesn't even really matter if you swap L1 and L2, it usually causes no problems at all.
British phones use 3 wires and are a lot less DIY friendly!

Pulse dialling will work fine, all telephone lines (and even most VoIP adaptors) still understand it.

You will just have trouble with *# codes.

They were actually one of the first on the planet to have an entirely digital core network. This was achieved before the mid 80s, BT wasn't in that position until the 1990s!!!

Most local exchanges were also digital by the 1980s, and the very oldest electromechancial technology "Step-by-Step" was shut down in local exchanges by about 1988, it continued in service in the UK well into the 90s in some places.

The last areas to cut over to full digital service in the early 1990s were connected to 1970s era Ericsson ARF crossbar exchanges, these were not digital and did use electromechanical relay switching, but were heavily computerised, very effective and supported touch-tone dialling and many other features. Only difference you'd have noticed as an end user was a lack of services like call waiting, call forwarding etc. and calls took a little longer to go through i.e. not instantaneous. Even these, were "parented" by a near-by digital exchange so only the local functions were analogue. So, your call was never transmitted in analogue form beyond the local switch. Also, if you requested ISDN or any of the other services there was always an option of connecting you to a co-located digital exchange without much fuss.

It was quite a cutting edge high tech network for its time. Sadly eircom have not continued the level of investment that went on through the 1980s and 90s under Telecom Eireann.

Even if our retail broadband rollout's rather slow, the network's by no means in bad shape. It's just eircom are a cut throat business and are drip feeding broadband as slowly as they can get away with at the highest price point they can set... Quite a rational thing for a business to do, they're a PLC not a public service body...

The removal of various barriers to competition has improved and continues to improve things, but we're a few years behind where we should be because of the poor regulation.

It's amazing though when you consider that many rural areas of Ireland jumped from manually switched, by an operator with a board and plugs straight to cutting edge digital back in the 1980s and some urban areas in Dublin and Cork went from 1930s dial equipment to digital in a single leap too. We largely bypassed a lot of the 1960s and 70s technology as a result.

On the dial phone issue:

If you've DSL, you'll absolutely need to fit a filter between the phone and the line!
The other option is to buy a BT Master socket with built in ADSL filter and connect you British phone to the extension connections inside it.

Wire the BT master socket to the red and green wires of a normal Irish or US phone cord and plug it straight in to any irish phone socket.

Then hardwire your dial phone to the extension ports of the BT socket.

Should work!
However, DO NOT connect anything directly to the phone line without an eircom socket... It's often less hassle to just plug into the front of it.

It should be <Line>---<eircom socket>--<RJ11 plug>--<BT master with built in ADSL filter>

The phone could suck quite a lot of power from the line and may/may not ring.. hard to know!

Irish lines and digital exchanges don't necessarily output the correct voltages to make this old UK phone ring correctly, even with all the adaptors in place...
Frequency of the ring voltage may not be what the phone expects to receive either, but still it'll more than likely work!!

The ARF switches were around for a LONG time (manufactured from the 1950s-1970s), but they went through various generations. They were in widespread use until the 1990s in much of Europe, Scandinavia, Australia etc..

They were replaced with Ericsson's AXE digital switches

There are 2 switch vendors used for the eircom network and two switch types:

Ericsson AXE
and
Alcatel E10

They're designed to be highly modular and have been through lots of generations and incremental upgrades since they appeared in the network in the 1980s. They're extremely well proven, very reliable systems that are used all over the world.

The ARF switches are long gone in Ireland though at this stage though and even when they were in their last days of service (late 80s - early 90s) they were not really doing anything other than switching local calls in quite limited areas with all higher functions being performed by digital switching systems. As old as the technology was, it worked, extremely reliably and was in use all over the world. Similar systems were in use in the US, Canada, Australia and much of Europe. They only finally vanished in the 1990s !!!

What you have to remember is that the capital cost of any of these systems is absolutely enormous (billions) so the network operators have to get their money's worth. They don't upgrade them as often as you'd upgrade your PC.

They also tend to be adaptable, so you can add functionality and newer technology to them without replacing the entire system.

The Alcatel E10 gear they have has a pretty interesting history. Despite claims of other companies it was the very first fully digital TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) public voice switch, the first prototype having gone into service in 1970 in France. They started development for it in the early 1960s!

It predates the AT&T/Lucent (now Alcatel) ESS family by quite a few years and is the world's first fully developed digital switch platform.

Nokia makes the utterly ridiculous claim on its website that it produced Europe's first digital telephone switch in 1985 ! (almost 20 years later)

P&T, and then later Telecom Eireann decided to go with TDM technology by the late 1970s / early 1980s. At that stage AXE was still not a TDM switch, it used space division multiplexing, it only became a TDM based system in the mid 80s and was selected as the second switching supplier at that stage. Ericsson also offered an easy upgrade path for the ARF/ARK (crossbar) switches to digital i.e. they were able to do a seamless cut over.

The E10 switches eircom use have also been through umpteen upgrades and generations, they're pretty similar to AXE in terms of what they can do, but they're truly one of the 'grandaddies' of the electronic communications revolution.

You'll find a mixture of E10 and AXE in the eircom system, the entire 07 are is E10 switched and most of the midlands and south west (not including Cork City which is exclusively AXE).

Dublin's 50:50 between both systems, depends on the area.

The current versions of both AXE and E10 are pretty impressive kit though, rock solid and highly modular i.e. you can rip bits out of them and replace parts, upgrade software etc without interrupting a single call.

http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/doctypes/opgproductbrochure/pdf/1000_MM_E10_bro.pdf

That's the brochure for the latest E10 update.