The things I didn't know are now no longer worth knowing...

I currently find myself involved in the disposal of a large carrier-grade AXE-10 voice exchange switch. During my brief foray as a Voice Switch Design Engineer (1999-2001), I was never actually an Ericsson-man; but the AXE-10, like the Nortel DMS100, symbolised all that I didn't know about telephony. It was an all-singing-all-dancing voice switch that was built for handling all the complexities of C7/SS7, DASS2 and alike, whereas I confined my dabbling to the smaller Nortel MMCS and Seimens Hicom switches.

I used to get trapped in conversations with a certain long haired Voice Engineer, who lived and breathed DMS and AXE's. He would start rambling on about how he found a command that could 'manipulate a flag bit on the CDR' blah blah blah blah blah.... I had no idea why he was even telling me this, let alone what it actually meant. I thought I was destined to forever feel the pain of not knowing enough to say I was a real Voice player, because I didn't speak DMS or AXE.

However, now I am making enquiries about the market for obsolete AXE-10 parts (the AXE was the most popular carrier-grade switch in its prime) for the thousands of AXE-10's still in operation; everyone is telling me it should go in a museum.

On one hand they are right - the way forward today for voice carrier technology is firmly established as IP, removing the hundreds of ITU variations that native voice developed in the environment of government Postal and Telegraph agencies and Cold War isolation. [Not forgetting the French desire for 'Viva la difference!' and developing their own standard in spite of everyone else.] However on the other hand, I think this view demonstrates one's limited exposure in Telecoms if we all think the world is like AT&T, BT or another such Tier One Telco.

Whilst the business case exists for rolling out new services straight onto an IP platform, in many economies and corners of the telecoms industry, the case can not be made for migrating off legacy voice platforms in the same way. Voice telephony is probably the most ubiquitous global technology that exists today and touches all corners of the Earth - this means that emerging countries and third world economies are still converging their voice and data traffic and are likely to operate and maintain legacy voice platforms, such as the AXE-10 . I am not sure what, those who think it should go in a museum, think all their current analogue voice circuits terminate on?

So I remain hopeful that there is a market out there for AXE-10 cards, but I guess we'll eventually see who's right.