local access for rural telco

Local access to what? The rural telcos don't need to buy someone else's used crap. Small switches were developed quicker that large C.O.'s. A modified Mitel SX-200 was serving a C.D.O. (community dial office) in the early '80's and another Canadian company made an advanced scalable switch with DTMF and CLASS features by 1988 or so. I think that was pretty advanced as we didn't get ours until it was tarriffed in 1989 or so.

A class 5 (end office) didn't need much in the way of switching power, a group of trunks to the toll center and a way to bill the outgoing calls, usually handled by the class 4 office it handed the calls to, and everything was done.

The last manual board in our state converted to a Quatman step office in 1979 or so. It used Mitel Touch Tone converters, ANI, and registersenders to transmit the billing info to our central office. I think the upgraded switch came before we got ours and they had CID and custom calling feature before us :-)

Carl Navarro

And what state was that, Carl?

McClure, OH 419-748

Pots, DSL, etc For say around 6000 drops

We are replacing our Mitels with a metaswitch. The remote COs are getting Occam blades, and losing the switching capability they had with the Mitel, hence all switching will be done by a central Metaswitch, except for the really remote villages, which will have their own Metaswitch

Thanks for the reply