This is just me rattling on, probably a candidate for Ancient tech.
The overhead I was talking about is that last Golden Mile before it transitions to fiber. There are load coils, lightning arrestors etc inline and heavy cable hanging off a pole to make the thing work because metallic facility - twisted pair or coax - is subject to electrical and environmental factors. Audio quality and reliability of service literally rides on it. Dedicated phone service is becoming increasingly scarce, delivery of broadband is the name of the game and that's why the old twisted pair around here is coiled up. In the Ancient Tech thread I caught a utility pole someone had used duct tape to wind it up.
The actual broadband product the cable company delivered was not great and their admin side, the pricing and packaging finally drove me into the arms of my despised foe: Verizon. I loathed dealing with them on the clock but when they finally offered fiber optic to the desktop - FiOS - I switched. There is no Golden Mile, its plastic right to the desktop. It delivers a vastly superior product and their admin is actually easy to deal with too. The plastic pipe does not care about anything the metallic facility does and the picture quality we stream is breathtaking. They ran a drop from the pole to my house and put an optical termination box (ONT) at house entry. From there it can use the the ethernet and coax already in place for its set top boxes. Getting an FXS port - a dial tone line - out of the ONT in the basement was just a matter of telling them I wanted the phone service and then peeling the little sticker off the port that would be there anyway. It's a little baby gateway.
Any modern telephone system is mostly virtualized these days, no more heaving groaning power sucking weird PBXs in subterranean dungeons, its all on big IP networks. But there are things that need to physically touch the outside world and media gateways accomplish that, they come in many flavors and sizes. I put a million Mediant gateways in for HBO in the NY Metro area after I cut their old systems over to fully integrated VoIP. With Metro North and the same goal I put in substantially larger and more robust Avaya 1010 MGs because their rail yards have umpteen phones in boxes all over God's Green Earth. Gateways mean you bring the device on the extant network as close as possible to the point of use the same as FiOS does in my house. Faxes, alarms, ringdown circuits like when you pull up to a gate and there is a box on the fence, that sort of thing. The railroad still extends these types over long stretches of copper wire, sometimes miles, of necessity and they behave no differently than the older methods they replaced. Like FiOS the old gadgets have no idea Ma Bell is dead.
Long way to go to talk about a service nobody gives much of a crap about before. I got to see the whole thing from electromechanical switching to the latest and greatest. my great joy is to not have to do any of that nonsense ever again, I can sit on my ass and work part time or not and the most complicated service call I get anymore is putting on a wiper blade or changing a key fob battery or being super technical and taking a toaster out to check a battery. Telecom is dead, long live telecom !
Being Canadian recognize this logo? The teat from which I suckled as a nascent repairman
My favorite meme I found hanging on an old PBX. I gave it a place of honor taped to the oil tank in the garage.
