Continued from: Jobs I've Had - Telecom Australia (2) As mentioned on the previous post the task of physically connecting the pair of wires in the telephone exchange was only the first part of the job to connect a telephone service. Manual records were kept at the exchange and were either written by hand or typed on to small cards. As I said before, Inala had 7000 telephone lines so there were roughly 7000 small cards each with the subscribers name, address, phone number and cable pair on it as well as space for other details if needed. The cards were kept in drawers in numerical order for later reference, other similar but larger cards existed to record what was connected to each cable pair. So if you knew the phone number you could look at the small card to find out the cable pair it should be connected to, or, if you knew the cable pair you could look at the bigger card to see what phone number should be working on that cable pair. These local records were essential for fault finding when a telephone service stopped working, such as when a street cable was damaged. Another small part of the task was to read the subscribers meter for billing purposes. Unlike water or electricity meters which are in or outside peoples homes, telephone billing meters were at this time at the exchange. A special room was sometimes dedicated for the racks of small meters for each and every phone number. Inala exchange had a meter room, which I must add was a nice quiet room if a nap at lunch time was needed..!! Below is part of a meter rack with each panel holding 100 meters, each vertical rack holding 10 panels or 1000 meters. Inala exchange had seven of these racks to accommodate the 7000 phone numbers that could be connected there. If you were connecting a phone service for 372 4586 you would go to rack 4 (four thousand), panel 5 (five hundred) and write down the number on meter 86. This meter reading was recorded on the small subscriber record card and also sent to a central office for billing purposes. Each time a person made a local phone call the little meter would tick over and advance one number. For a long distance call the meter would tick over periodically based on the distance of the call and the time of day. When the monthly phone bill was due a person from the billing area visited the exchange and took a photo of each panel of 100 meters. The photos were developed and somebody in the billing area had to enter each and every number into the billing system. The billing system would subtract the previous meter reading from the current meter reading to determine the total number of calls made that month. Sometimes the little meters would jam meaning a subscriber would not get metered correctly and would get some free calls. If this was detected in the billing process the technician at the exchange would get asked to open the panel of 100 meters and replace the defective meter with a brand new spare part. There were also occasions when the billing area suspected the meter was working but not counting reliably, again giving the subscriber free or discounted phone calls. In this case the technician would make five test calls from the subscribers phone line and make sure five meter registrations were recorded. A little form filled in and sent to the billing area accounted for the test calls made by the technician so the subscriber was not charged for them. To complete the connection process for a telephone line there were a couple more things to do. A little bit of data needed to be entered via a terminal and a test made to make sure that the subscriber now had dial tone. I'll explain that further next time as it involves talking about the type of telephone exchange. The equipment was all Swedish and manufactured by L. M. Ericsson. The type of exchange switching equipment was called crossbar but it had been very recently upgraded to processor control - the system was known as ARE 11 - and I loved working on it..!! To be continued.....
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AuthorI love to understand things, how they work, why they happen - I'm always learning and keen to investigate... Archives
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