atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information LIFE OF PHONE SYSTEMS....

If you are in Texas or Missouri your dial tone could be coming from a Western Electric 1A ESS switch that was installed in the early 70's. When they were installed the engineers said the objective was to have less than two hours down time in forty years. When I read about techs who have there own PBX to play with I remember that I would have to have a five car garage just for the CPU.

The environment plays a big factor in a Partner system. The cases are not vetilated well and the components overheat. We have had many that we go to move, turn them off, and they won't come back up. I bet it is a processor problem. Sometimes the co/station cards also create problems. I think they had a poor design engineered into them.

sort of like a antique car as long as your willing to throw money at it we can keep it going

I have a customer with a tie cx 1648 that I sold her used back in the late '80s processor has gone bad , im trying to intrest her ion something else , looks like shes going to go with refurb processor and some new handsets for the phones.

partner the same way , thing that I find bad are , flex circuits on mls phones , batterys on processor (causing program to drop with power fail ) caps on 206 boards (cuasing static )

keep replacing those as needed and it should keep going

Systems one and all have their problems and they stay pretty consistant for each model. I have repaired many types of systems their cards power supplies and phones. From membranes in partner phones to all the electrolitic caps on many types of power supplies. You would be surprised at the stacks of hardware fixes all and I repeat ALL companys have. The hardest part is after a few years they won't mfg support their products as they are in the business of new sales. Can't blame them its there line of work. The hard part for installers and field techs is making that choice between down time to send somthing out for repair,stocking spares etc. or selling them a new system. Most anything can be repaired as long as its not burnt up. As long as we inform endusers of all their options then you will allways have their business. Because we all want an honest answer. Its called customer satisfaction and should be everyones 1st priority.

My feeling is that the more complex any system is, the more things that can go wrong, and probably will.

My first VCR lasted about 12 years. I still have a 15 year old TV. New VCR lasted about 3 years and my 3 year old TV is already showing problems.

Yes, those are consumer electronics, but I'm guessing that every type of system built today will have a shorter lifespan of the older ones.

I was in communications in the military, and they love to keep 30+ year old equipment in use (along with the new high tech stuff they show on the news).

Many different types of systems (phone and others) are looking more like a PC every day. DVRs, POS, etc running on Windoze OS.
If I don't restart my PC often, I start to have problems.

You could probably keep many systems alive for quite some time with replacement parts. The question is, how much should be replaced before its time to dump it all.