Talk:Class-5 telephone switch

Class 4
Our colleague Luis F. Gonzalez (darn it, how do I put in a link to him?) has started editing an article about Class 4. I figure a better idea is to rename this article (singularize it, for one) and expand it with more information on whatever classes anyone knows about. That's on the theory that medium size articles are best, and any article about one class will necessarily be a small fragment of the bigger story, as this one is now.

Obviously switches are mostly Class 5 and as you go up the hierarchy they become less numerous and, at least to my POV (local switchman) less interesting, so the section on Classes 1 and 2 might not say much. Anyway the article should say a bit more about the origin of the class structure in the development of DDD in the 1950s, then list the various classes in paragraphs and, getting into Classes 4 and 5, whole sections. Jim.henderson 17:26, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Ah. Now I found an article on Office classification which had almost no working links with other articles. So, I fixed a broken link that should have come here, and put in a reciprocal link. That article calls Class 5 "Local Office". It calls Class 4 "Toll Center" if it had operators and "Toll Point" if not. To me these seem more reasonable as article names, since they are words and not numbers and were the standard terms around 1960 when the class hiearchy existed in its most coherent form. So, maybe after all our friend User:Luis_F._Gonzalez (yes, I figured how to link to him) is right and there should be separate articles for Class 4 and Class 5, only not under those excessively mysterious names. Jim.henderson 18:11, 2 November 2006 (UTC)


 * The Office classification article should be merged with the contents of this article. Or a new article with a better title than "Central" Office classification should be used, "PSTN hierarchy"? Yes, this article should be split into all five classes. Are there more, i.e. Class 8? The mysterious names, Class 5 or Class 4 can then redirect to less mysterious names.Luis F. Gonzalez 19:48, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

What is DDD? Direct Distance Dialing?Luis F. Gonzalez 19:48, 2 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Right. For the benefit of users I inserted the link in this article and in office classification, along with a reference to the era.  While making these little changes, I am progressively more convinced that there should be only one article about the classification system, with sections for the more interesting Classes 4 and 5, rather than splitting the topic into one master classification article with links to five particular class articles.  If we had a lot to say about a class, then separate articles would be the way to do it, but only two classes deserve several Kilobytes each plus several KB for the system as a whole.  One comprehensive article will be reasonably compact and understandable.


 * Incidentally, to say the higher classes were traditionally digital and the lower ones traditionally analog is to describe a snapshot of a particular moment in the early 1980s. Replacing 4XB and 1ESS with 4ESS and DMS/5ESS was a long process with much overlapping.
 * Jim.henderson 16:13, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Newer switches
Any thoughts on mentioning some newer Class 5 switches like the Taqua T7000 and similar? -Jonathan Auer (talk) 05:15, 16 December 2007 (UTC)