• TN: Open Source: Why is the Knox County Sheriff's office phone line goi

    From Moderator@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jun 28 15:13:06 2021
    By Emma Davis, Report for America Corps Member

    EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is in response to a reader-submitted
    question through Open Source, a platform where readers can submit
    questions to the staff.

    MOUNT VERNON - Over the past few months, when community members have
    called the Knox County sheriff's office non-emergency line, the phone
    has rung, and rung, and has continued ringing without end.

    This was because intermittent equipment malfunctions prevented the
    phone system from being triggered to take calls, said Kyle Webb,
    Director for Information Technology services in Knox County

    https://www.knoxpages.com/open_source/open-source-why-is-the-knox-county-sheriffs-office-phone-line-going-down/article_9361c4d4-d513-11eb-ae0c-270759fd1433.html

    ***** Moderator's Note *****

    During the early days of the transition to Customer-provided
    equipment, many companies purchased PBX's from manufacturers that did
    not use "standard," Mother-Bell-Approved ringing voltages and
    grounding.

    Except, once one of the PBX's wasn't made by Western by-Ghod Electric,
    things started to break. As a result, those PBX owners soon found
    themselves unable to use "Extensions Off Premise," which were PBX
    numbers that were connected to distant locations, such as the
    company's warehouse. Such lines, which worked fine when connected to
    the step-by-step electromechanical PBX's supplied by Western Electric,
    would sometimes not be able to relay ringing voltage supplied without
    a ground reference. For example, Rolm PBX's had something like 70
    volts between tip and ring, usually enough to ring a "500" set, but it
    was floating, *NOT* referenced to ground, and would not, therefore,
    trip the "R" relay in some T-Carrier "FXO" (Foreign eXchange, Office
    end) channel units.

    The solution, back then in the dark ages when dinosaurs roamed the
    earth, was that most of the PBX companies rushed to make their PBX's "compatible" with Western Electric equipment.

    You're probably thinking, since this is 2021, "Why didn't they just
    dial '9' and make a regular call?" To which I, and probably many other
    old phone guys, would reply "Oh, you innocent children!"

    In the bad 'ol days of Mother Bell's monopoly, prices (I almost wrote
    "rates," but few would understand) for even local calls between
    business locations were exorbitant, and most large companies went to
    great lengths to avoid any use of the PSTN that wasn't clearly
    unavoidable. Large companies would have "tie lines" in-between their
    PBX's, either from one operator position to another, or connected
    directly so that PBX users at either end could dial directly into the
    other PBX. The Tie Lines, which utilized DX signalling - the epitome
    of ground-referenced signalling, dating from early single-wire
    telegraph lines - would not work with the CPE PBX's that used isolated
    ground environments and didn't understand *ANY* ground-referenced
    lines.

    The revisions, hardware modifications, and other work-arounds served
    for a few decades, but now that Western Electric is deader than the
    batteries that Thomas Alva Edison wanted to use to transport elec-
    tricity between cities, well, it seems some incompatibilities have
    crept back in to a no-longer-quite-so-well-integrated network.

    Bill Horne
    Moderator

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