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On Oct 30, 2024, at 09:49, Ethan O'Toole via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Yeah, you can get reasonably compact. When I worked in a telco lab we had a Nortel DMS-100 (a European competitor to the 5ESS), and it fit in a half rack.
The DMS-100 was made by a Canadian company. Are you thinking EWSD or AXE-10 instead?
Oh wow! I toured a local telco in Chesapeake VA as a kid (a wild story in itself) and they were running on a Nortel DMS-100. It wasn't small, but then again a lot of the size is the subscriber loop hardware that isn't needed for a minimal setup. There are a few of them in collector hands now!
Any reason to think you need something as complicated as a 5ESS? There are plenty of older PBX solutions out there which would probably get the job done for such a small number of analog lines.
It's the mountaintop! I've owned a Lucent Merlin Legend with Audix (several generations) systems and have a Parner or two (Thanks Jason!) but there is nothing more legendary than the 5ESS. The legend from Phrack magazine articles in the 90s. Plus if this is the window to do it, it's the window to do it if they are really heading to the scrappers.
- Ethan