Land line engineers look here

[Andy_con]

the "wife" has come across this very very old phone and wants to use it.

would this old phone with pulsed dial (i think) work one the current dial tone lines?

all advise welcome

 

[Adam.]

Plug it in and try?

 

[Andy_con]

needs fixing but i didnt wana fix if it aint going to work

 

[Mot!]

It will yes, phone lines aren't classed as pule or tone dial.

Pulse dialing just takes a little longer.

My grandad uses a rotary telephone still, take him ages to dial a number. Waiting for it to return to the stop and all that lark..

 

[Andy_con]

ok cool looks like i beta fix the fooker then.

cheers

 

[bully]

You need to contact your provider, some new exchanges will not accept pulses.

They are changing out the switches here at the moment to new next gen stuff (basically servers) and they wont work with pulse. If you have a normal digital exchange it should work.

The way you could try it is to see if your home phone has a p/t button on it...ie pulse and tone and switch it to pulse and try dialling. Or grab one off an "old" relative ;-)

 

[Andy_con]

so say our exchange has been changed would this phone be able to receive calls but not dial?

 

[richy22]

Do you know what exchange you are on??

Check here...

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_mapping

Put in your postcode and hopefully you should see what one you on. I think your nearish me (Im in Hadleigh) your in Essex somewhere from memory?? And most of our exchanges over this way should work with older phones.

 

[richy22]

Also do you know the model of that?? Some of the older Bell type phones had a seperate bell ringing circuit that required the bell wire to be be pulsed with x amount of volts in order for it to ring (this is a bit before my time in telecoms!!) The Bell wire is now redundent in the modern BT framework.

 

[Andy_con]

ADSL available at ~6Mbps
BT Total broadband
TalkTalk LLU
Sky LLU
AOL broadband (non-LLU)
Pipex broadband
Plusnet broadband
Tiscali broadband
AOL LLU
And many more...

ADSL2+ available at ~8.5Mbps
Be Unlimited
O2 broadband
UK Online (incl 20M packages)
Sky Max (LLU)

Cable services not available

FTTC services available

BT 21CN services available

Wireless services not available

your asking me questions i dont know the anwser to, ive not opened it up yet. but the phone does have two big bells on the back

 

[bully]

Has it got a normal comms plug on it? Can it be plugged into a normal BT socket? If it has then it has been in a modern network and would have worked more than likely.

If it has 4/5 bare wires at the end of the lead then it may have been hard wired as they used to be. To plug in to a modern socket it will need a plug crimped on and the colours being in the correct sequence in this plud to work. Also you will need a special crimping tool and plug for this.

I would look for a similar looking phone online somewhere, which is a modern copy and just plugs in and works.

 

[Andy_con]

sadly 4 bare wires, this is an old phone. its made from actual marble.

i have the crimping tool

 

[richy22]

Take some more photo's and try and see if a model number is on there...im sure I have one of those in the museum here at work. I work in telecoms and our boss has basically bought all the old BT Strowger kit that was the proper old school type of Bt exchanges...they sound awesome when energized

 

[Andy_con]

will do boss will try get it open to get some pics of inside.

it would make the wife very happy if she could use this thing

 

[bully]

Get some more pics up and I will try to help. Post one of the wire colours etc, it's been 15 ish years since I was a linesman

Good news about the crimp, and a few of the plugs too then??

Richy, I have seen Strowger working in a mock up...awesome stuff. Had to do it as part of my Btech...wtf it had been phased out for bloody years!!

 

[richy22]

It might of been phased out but BT still had them in certain exchanges..they had it all in one of the musuem ones in London (can't remember the name) and one of my bosses bought it all as they didn't want it! God knows why they didn't give it to some type of museum??!! :S So my boss is building his own museum which is bloody cool..All the proper old skool stuff with strowger's, the old manual type switches, I think he also has a couple fo these type.....

1920's PABX board

We are even documenting all of the old BT drawings as they literally chucked them away in boxes at Adastral park or similar? :S Thousands and thousands of old drawings for literally every type of unit used in the "good ol days"

 

[bully]

Ah sweeet. Love the old stuff, after being a linesman i worked on PABXs but none that old!! Worked in Alan Wickers gaff here and he had a pretty old electro mechanical PABX...sort of like strowger lol.

We fitted a nice new digital one, wish I had kept the old one. Hopefully between me, you and your boss we can get andys phone working.

Guernsey (our sister Island and even more inbred than us) has a comms museum and geekily enough I have been to it. It has closed recently....hmmm wonder what is happening to all the old stuff in there....

 

[Cookie]

They're probably throwing it into the sea bully

Or using it in the foundations for the new data centre

 

[bully]

Dont say that, I hate seeing shizzle like that getting slung.

You're probably right though, retarded Donkeys.

 

[richy22]

Your Jersey Telecom aren't you bully?? I believe some of our kit is used by yourselves. Not much. Switch modules for test access named SMUT-Stars (what a name!!) and I "think" some of our ISMC's are used too?? Was a very small order I think about 2 years ago..might of even been a trial or something.

 

[Cookie]

Swear words!

I f**king hate JT, useless cnuts

Forever f**king up our PBX in St Helier

 

[bully]

I was Jersey Telecom, took VR last April after 15 years. Had enough of it tbh, all too much of a ballache for me. Was lucky to have been there during some awesome times. As I said I started as a linesman, which was a great job...driving around peoples gaffs all day fixing faults. Climbing poles etc, was my own boss. Worked my way up over the years engineering wise, eventaully specialised in Mobile networks, looking after Switching...MSC's, HLRs etc then moved for my last 2 years to the radio side of GSM. Just started to get involved with the NGN integration but decided to walk.

Been travelling for the last 8 months so unemployed at the mo

Edit at Cookie, lol it would be fine if I was still there on PBX's. I worked at CPA many a time over the years sorting the old Mitel SX2000 out. Those days were the last time I really enjoyed my job!!

 

[richy22]

I'd quite like to of been a "proper" line engineer. I hate the telecoms industry now. I deal with some right old monkey installers Telent are the worst. Most of the guys don't even have a simple multimeter! And then stuff -50v into the LAN port of our units and wonder why it literally blows up! :S. clowns!!

Or the other classic was not makin sure an RJ45 was plugged into one of our units correctly, even after asking numerous times to check they were. Drove all the way upto scarbrough, checked all the leads and sure enough one made a "click" as I pushed it. Ring up BT ops and sure enough all of the new units they were installing were showing up on the system. Took me 4 minutes to do that! ROFL

 

[hixxy]

Uniselector anyone?

 

[richy22]

That's what the strowger is. They had a single axis type to start then two axis ones mounted in 8 foot racks. I tell you they make a lovely noise when on "full chat" I can imagine that noise back in the day

 

[Cookie]

Edit at Cookie, lol it would be fine if I was still there on PBX's. I worked at CPA many a time over the years sorting the old Mitel SX2000 out. Those days were the last time I really enjoyed my job!!

Oooh.. I bet you know some of the people I work with