What’s New
A Visit to the Ellsworth Telephone Museum – October 2024
In October 2024, I had the opportunity to visit The Telephone Museum in Ellsworth, Maine. This museum had so much to see! It features many different kinds of telephones, manual cordboards, several Step by Step switches, several All-Relay switches – and finally an entire #3 crossbar switch and a partial #5 crossbar switch. This is a place that a telephone enthusiast must visit at least once in their life. There is a long write-up on my visit, plenty of photos, and also plenty of videos! Please visit the Ellsworth, ME Telephone Museum section
Preserving a #5ESS Switch for Posterity
In June 2023, Telephone World was invited to participate in preserving a small #5ESS switch at a rural telephone company for posterity. This was no small feat as you can imagine! Check out the Preserving a #5ESS Switch for all the details and a TON of pictures!
Telephone News
And now Bell Canada is buying Ziply Fiber
Whose buying whom?
Bell Canada is buying Ziply Fiber, which only formed a few years ago and bought former GTE/Verizon/Frontier territory in Washington state, Idaho, Oregon, and Montana. Looks like it will take several years to complete and will cost around C$5 Billion.
Now of course I’m curious as to why they think they’ll succeed here in the US. I think Ziply was barely keeping afloat with all the debt that they have. Investing so much in new infrastructure is expensive. Retiring those old TDM switches for softswitches, and of course all that new fiber (or is that now fibre?) that they’ve been putting in to upgrade folks to some really fast high speed Internet. Google found out that it’s really expensive to put that in, and I think Ziply was in over their head. Hope that Bell Canada can succeed and make a profit.
Verizon to merge with Frontier
This goes under the “what are they thinking?” department. Verizon is mostly a wireless company, with a FTTH as a sideline and a copper infrastructure they’d rather get rid of. But they are buying Frontier for the FIOS network they divested themselves from about 10 years ago. FIOS is the only thing keeping the “wireline” side of Verizon afloat, as nobody is keeping the copper side going. And what little bit of copper they have they’re S-L-O-W-L-Y moving away from TDM to packet switching. But that’s moving at a snail’s pace. So I’m just very surprised they actually care about FTTH and literally buying it back from Frontier. But I assume the aging copper plant is going along with it?
And keep in mind, even Frontier has a reduced footprint than before. They sold the aging copper plant and the little bit of fiber plant to Ziply Fiber in four states (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana) so that’s even less FIOS FTTH than before. Ziply, on the other hand, has ripped out pretty much every TDM switch they had and replaced it with packet (probably Metaswitch) and going full bore with their FTTH installations.
More info here: https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/verizon-is-reportedly-near-a-deal-to-buy-broadband-provider-frontier-communications-210317747.html
AT&T Tandem and Jenny List updates
Both the AT&T Tandem and the Jenny lists have been updated. Check them out!