Today I want to show you around my Telco room. In this room we house tons of equipment. Google has equipment here, Charter, AT&T and Comcast are housed here, and I get to work on all of it. I can't really take pics of anything specific due to security concerns, but I did my best to show you a little of it.
Here is some equipment I worked on getting decommissioned. The funnier part of the story is, almost 20yrs ago I helped install this stuff. The decomm process is long and drawn out. You have to turn this down in a specific order one card at a time. If you get it wrong you have to rebuild all of it (software) and start over. The main controller will store the system alarms even if the equipment is gone.
So let's take a look at this stuff. Any equipment that has copper wire going to it other than power is at end of life. Everything now is fiber optic and much smaller.
Each of these bays has what are called wire blocks. 25 pair cables run to each block and there are 8 blocks minimum per bay. When installing this equipment I would sit on a ladder for usually 2 weeks "wire wrapping" these blocks. Here is what a block looks like.
You have a specific color code to follow to make sure they are all correct. The tool you use to land these is called a wire wrap gun. You strip back around 3 inches of wire and shove the bare wire into your gun. Then you push the end of the gun over the pin and it wraps the wire onto the pin. When you are done it ends up looking like this.
After a few hours of wrapping these down you are pretty much cross eyed. Each one of these wires had to be tested individually for connectivity.
Enough about the old equipment. Here is the newer equipment. As I said before, I can't show much of the equipment, but you get the idea. Yes the room is really that loud. It is like being inside a computer with fans blowing constantly. The white noise in the room will put you to sleep fast if you don't have some music or headphones on.
I hope you enjoyed the walk around my work. This is only 1/3 of the equipment room I work in. Most don't think about what is happening to make your cell phone work, but this is where the magic happens. Have you ever been in a switch room? Ever work in Telecommunications?
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