AK wrote:
Just curious.

Frontier has a building close to me that is used for the plain old telephone system.

I was wondering what is in that building and what is it called?

It has no windows.

I found this.

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/telephone2.htm

Andy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_concentrator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digita...ss_multiplexer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange

And so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...phone_switches

Between cities...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchr...cal_networking

Many (but not all) have battery_room + generator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_room

Sample buildings. What I find interesting about most of
these, is there's no sign of emergency power systems.
They've got to be in there. You need to have at least
a battery room. I like how one of the pictures like
this I could find, there's razor wire to keep people
from climbing the fence. They don't do that here.
Just a moat and alligators :-)

http://www.co-buildings.com/az/520/

Finally, a sample with an external exhaust pipe. There
is likely a generator and battery room in the section
with the exhaust pipe. Sometimes the shape of the
building, gives away what is inside it. You might be
able to run on battery for 24 hours in some cases - but
not in the larger COs that are "all digital", as they're
power pigs.

http://www.co-buildings.com/va/804/bethia_tb.jpg

Even our cell towers here, finally got their own
generators. But it took a prolonged outage, and all
the cell towers going down at once, to make it apparent
they needed to fix that. Now, when they put up a new
cell tower, there's a cute little generator building
next to it.

The only problem with the cell tower idea, is I don't
think anyone has a plan, to drive around to all the
cell towers and fill up the tanks, if there is an
extended outage. They're still probably depending
on the power coming back, relatively quickly.

Paul