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I've been out of the industry just long enough to remember that Cerent 454's got rebranded as Cisco 15454's right near the end of my tenure... Yow. Way to make

I've been out of the industry just long enough to remember that Cerent 454's got rebranded as Cisco 15454's right near the end of my tenure... Yow. Way to make a guy feel old! :P

walrus01 3y ago
Mostly I was using the 15454 as an example, there's lots of other 20 to 30 year old stuff out there in the TDM transport sector that's only available on ebay, through weird used equipment dealers, or by finding a decom from another ISP/telco.. Stuff like T1 (or DS0!) to DS3 mux/demux to attach to a 15454, or similar. There's literally 911 call center transport circuits being held together by the telco equivalent of duct tape and string right now, nobody notices until it breaks. One of the weird challenges in building a new state-of-the-art inter city DWDM transport network now is dealing with things like legacy customers that have one OC48 and are unlikely to drop it any time soon, it's a considerable monthly revenue source, and have to deal with stuffing that into the system along with 100Gbps and greater coherent circuits. Also from a customer relations perspective sometimes the customer literally forgets that they have this extremely exensive DS3 or OC48 or something in monthly recurring billing, and you don't want to bring it to the attention of management, because they might go "are we still using this?" and cancel it.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  > There's literally 911 call center transport circuits being held together by the telco equivalent of duct tape and string right now, nobody notices until it breaks. And break it does. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/911-dispatch-system-in-oakland-fails-again/ https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/911-dispatch-system-in-o...
  - com 3y ago
    I contracted for a telco who held a national emergency number contract, and after they fired all the old engineers and the inevitable outages started happening, had to budget a significant amount per month for flowers for families of the deceased who weren’t able to reach anybody during heart attacks etc. It would have been better if it was really big SLA breach fines however.

I've been out of the industry just long enough to remember that Cerent 454's got rebranded as Cisco 15454's right near the end of my tenure... Yow. Way to make a guy feel old! :P

walrus01 3y ago

Mostly I was using the 15454 as an example, there's lots of other 20 to 30 year old stuff out there in the TDM transport sector that's only available on ebay, through weird used equipment dealers, or by finding a decom from another ISP/telco.. Stuff like T1 (or DS0!) to DS3 mux/demux to attach to a 15454, or similar. There's literally 911 call center transport circuits being held together by the telco equivalent of duct tape and string right now, nobody notices until it breaks. One of the weird challenges in building a new state-of-the-art inter city DWDM transport network now is dealing with things like legacy customers that have one OC48 and are unlikely to drop it any time soon, it's a considerable monthly revenue source, and have to deal with stuffing that into the system along with 100Gbps and greater coherent circuits. Also from a customer relations perspective sometimes the customer literally forgets that they have this extremely exensive DS3 or OC48 or something in monthly recurring billing, and you don't want to bring it to the attention of management, because they might go "are we still using this?" and cancel it.

LeoPanthera 3y ago
> There's literally 911 call center transport circuits being held together by the telco equivalent of duct tape and string right now, nobody notices until it breaks. And break it does. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/911-dispatch-system-in-oakland-fails-again/ https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/911-dispatch-system-in-o...
- com 3y ago
  I contracted for a telco who held a national emergency number contract, and after they fired all the old engineers and the inevitable outages started happening, had to budget a significant amount per month for flowers for families of the deceased who weren’t able to reach anybody during heart attacks etc. It would have been better if it was really big SLA breach fines however.