A class 5 switch is a hugely important piece of network equipment – providing phone services, including 911 calls to thousands of homes, businesses, hospitals and governments. So any time you need to replace the switch – and migrate service to a new platform – you need to plan and execute the switch migration carefully… Continue Reading
Network Evolution
Nationwide Number Portability – why should I care?
Local Number Portability (LNP) was mandated by Congress in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, and even though we’ve had 24 years to get used to the idea, LNP still creates many interesting challenges for those building switch translations. The idea of Nationwide Number Portability (NNP) has been around almost as long, but is gathering momentum, and… Continue Reading
Why is your DMS-100 still in service?
The Nortel DMS-100 was released in 1979. There aren’t many pieces of technology that are 41 years old and still in active service, and yet we regularly run into people who still have DMS-100s active in their network. And yet, very rarely do we find a telco with only a DMS-100. Most folks have purchased… Continue Reading
New tandem trunks: how to migrate smoothly
We’ve worked with a few clients recently who needed to migrate to a new trunk group for their tandem traffic. Sometimes this is driven by the tandem provider – perhaps they’re simply updating their transport infrastructure and need you to use a new set of trunks, but nothing is really changing except the transport. In… Continue Reading
Residential and business wireline VoIP trends
I read an interesting article from Alianza today where they took some data published by the FCC (the data gets published slowly, so they’re looking at data from Dec 2017 and comparing to Dec 2016) and performed some interesting analysis. There were three items that stood out to me. 1. Surprisingly little VoIP is over-the-topOnly 25% of business VoIP lines use an over-the-top… Continue Reading
Is your spare Metaswitch CPU card a two-headed monster?
Imagine the scenario: You have a sturdy, long-running VP2510 chassis providing quality phone service for thousands of subscriber lines. Then one day you get an alarm about a hardware failure – one of your processor cards (CPU cards) has failed. Of course this is annoying, but no big deal because the Metaswitch chassis is redundant,… Continue Reading