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A Tour of the Pacific Bell Central Office
at 611 Folsom Street
by Don Hurter
Section
1: The Journey Begins
One of the components of Internet access that almost
everyone has to contend with is their connection through the public telephone
network. Dial-up customers either juggle their only line between voice calls
and modem connections, or else order a second and sometimes third line to set
aside for strict modem and/or fax use. At Sirius we manage multiple hundreds
of telephone lines just for our modems, each of which currently employs a pair
of copper wires running from the modems themselves to a main switching
facility at Pacific Bell, officially called a Central Office, or simply CO.
Within the CO all of the local telephone trunks converge
through an elaborate system of switching equipment, where any one call
connects to its destination electronically (in the past, all switching was
accomplished mechanically), and the voice or data traffic flows transparently
from point A to point B for the duration of that call. Earlier in November, a
few of us at Sirius had the opportunity to see the innards of our own
PacBell CO at 611 Folsom Street, south of Market Street in San Francisco.
Almost anywhere in the world telephone switching centers
are considered to be different from standard office or industrial buildings,
primarily because of their role in the communications infrastructure which the
world runs on. Reliability and security takes on greater importance with each
passing year, especially in areas where much of the business backbone depends
on communications and data transport. San Francisco is a prime example of
this, and the nerve center of its telecommunications network resides
principally in 611 Folsom.
This is evident even before one enters the building; its
exterior characterizes an overkill edifice of functionality, from the
unnerving lack of windows to its cold, titanium-colored panels which defy the
impact of any urban dirt accumulations that would mar the appearance of normal
office buildings. The security is likewise appropriate for a building of its
importance; no casual visitors get by the front desk without proper
authorization, and the elevators are all centrally controlled. We met our
Pacific Bell sales rep outside for a tour which was originally requested
months before.
The Underground Cable Vault
The first stop, logically enough, was at the place where
everything begins or ends, depending on which side of the city's wiring
infrastructure you might be; the underground cable vault. This 20 x 200 foot
reinforced concrete chamber is the building's interface to the outside world,
where the giant multi-thousand pair cables entered from their paths under the
streets. The cables, some as large as 3 to 4 inches in diameter, are
constructed from multiple layers of PVC jackets surrounding grounding meshes,
and then the fat bundles of individually insulated copper wires, twisted
together in pairs to define a separate phone circuit.
The cables are internally pressurized to keep any water
or other contaminates from seeping in at the junctions, and all are
electrically grounded to drain lightning strikes or other unwanted voltage
hits which would otherwise fry the switching gear or people who handle them.
They enter at various points through thick concrete bulkheads, and then lie
like enormous lazy snakes on steel racks which lined the walls inside the
vault.
Also down in the basement are the massive diesel
generators which provide the back-up power to the whole works in case PG&E's
service fails. Most of the critical switching equipment is attached to banks
of conventional batteries scattered throughout the nine-story building, but
for events which bring down the outside power for extended periods the
generators will kick in and take over. There are two of them (everything
important to the operations, from the switching equipment to the air
conditioners, have redundancy built in) and both of the engines are run one
hour a week and then longer once a month to verify their operational status.
Each motor is a V-12 (or maybe even V-16), whose iron engine blocks are the
size of a compact car. The cooling fans are 10 feet across, and exhaust
outward through vents which are visible on Second Street on the side of the
building. The engines appeared to be still cooling down from a test run, as
one could hear occasional contraction pings from the exhaust manifolds.
Upstairs from the cable vault are the main cross-connect
frames, where all the individual pairs of wires bundled in the cables are
spread out and joined with the feeders to the switch gear. To get a feeling
for the scale of wiring involved, visualize every single phone circuit in one
area of the city, running from all the wall jacks in the neighboring houses,
apartments, and office buildings through the streets, where they concentrate
into larger and larger cables, like tributaries feeding a river, until they
reach the CO in the massive trunks entering the cable vault.
Now try to imagine how the phone company sorts out all
the thousands of pairs of wire so they can connect them to the switches. This
task is accomplished with the help of the cross-connect grid, which
effectively spreads out all of those wires across a huge latticework of steel
racks, approximately 12 feet high by 200 feet long. The big cables fan out
onto these frames on one side, and the feeders to the switches fan out on the
other, and humans then connect a pair of wires from one side to a
corresponding pair on the other by spooling out cross-connect wire along the
frame from one termination to another.
Not a One-to-One Correlation
The reason the main cable trunks can't simply be wired
up to the switches directly is that individual cable pairs under the streets
may break or fail for whatever reason, requiring that the circuit be switched
over to another available pair. Also, people sometimes move from one building
to another within the city, yet wish to retain their original phone number. To
provide flexibility for these changes, the phone company installs intermediate
cross-connect facilities and distribution frames between the underground
cables and the switches, allowing any given pair of wires to be arbitrarily
connected to any other, without having to tear the whole system apart.
The task of keeping all the pairs properly documented
and maintained is a considerable challenge, and contributes to the lead time a
customer must wait when they order or change phone service. The Folsom Street
CO alone can serve almost 100,000 individual phone circuits, and every last
one of those has its own pair of cross-connect wires snaking somewhere across
these frames.
On the same floor as these frames is an artifact of the
ever-changing nature of communications, namely an entire floor-wide
installation of obsolete switching equipment in the process of being torn out.
An earlier generation of equipment had lived its useful life in this building,
but few businesses can afford to get sentimental about yesterday's technology.
Row after row of switching gear stood lifeless, picked at by technicians like
a dead coyote exposed to hungry buzzards, its life support wires cut loose by
unmerciful diagonal cutters.
This image struck a chord in me, as I had the onerous
task last Memorial Day of taking those same cutting pliers to the very first
100-pair cable that I had installed at Sirius when moving all of the modems to
another location. The time span from when I wired up the first modem to the
fiftieth unit in those days was a matter of months, yet when it came time to
cut it all down to relocate the cable I only needed fifteen seconds to hack
through the wires. Here at the CO was that same situation, only magnified a
thousand-fold, as there were that many cables routed overhead to drop down and
feed the switches. And every last one of those cables showed the unmistakable
signs of the wire cutters - severed insulation and the exposed ends of the
copper wire, now completely useless for anything other than its recovery value
at a metals broker.
Section 2: Cables
A 2000-Lane Copper Highway
Overhead were our first glimpses of the monumental
cabling runs that permeated the building. Anyone who has spent any time on
large-scale wiring projects can appreciate the planning and implementation of
complex cable routing, be it A/V wires running through the intestines of a
recording studio, power cables spanning a manufacturing plant, or signal and
control wires laced through the fuselage of an aircraft.
In each case the installer must employ a set of skills
ranging from meticulous attention to the splices themselves to intuition of
how the layers of cables will pass through a three-dimensional space, even
before the first cable is even laid. Yet nothing can prepare one for the sheer
bulk and density of the cabling within a CO, as it fills overhead trays to
complete capacity, without a single unwanted twist or loop. Since the cable
trays are built from an open steel crosswork like railroad tracks, all of the
wires are exposed to view, and any sloppy crossovers or even a single
misplaced twist of two wires will stand out from the rest of the parallel
bundles.
The basic denomination of these wires is a 25-pair
cable, which means that 25 pairs of individual 22 GA wires are bundled in a
gray jacket whose overall diameter is slightly under 1/2". There are also 50-
and 100-pair cables which are simply larger versions of this, but the majority
of cables we saw were the 25-pair. Assuming that the original capacity of the
CO when it was built was something like 50,000 circuits (I'm guessing at that
time it might have been designed for half the capacity it now serves), there
would have to be on the order of 2000 of these 25-pair cables running from
point A to point B and then to point C as they merrily routed all the phone
calls through the equipment. Since there would also have to be redundancy in
case of cable failures, plus other overhead, let's say that a minimum path to
handle all the traffic would likely be double this amount, give or take a few
hundred.
Overhead Cable Racks
Try your best to visualize what this number of 1/2"
cables might look like stacked together in cross-section, and then remember
that they all don't simply lie as one long parallel run from one end of the
building to the other, but instead bend corners and branch off in groups of a
hundred or so, and then join other feeds, and sometimes disappear into a dense
intersection where thousands more cluster together to cross from one floor to
another.
Each individual 25-pair cable has a predetermined path
from one terminal to another somewhere else in the building, and all of these
countless cables have to route alongside and across each other in some logical
manner, while simultaneously detouring around fixed columns or beams. Entire
groups of fifty or so cables might split off from a main thoroughfare onto a
branch tray, and each bend has to be laid out so that it doesn't grossly
interfere with the rest of the cables, however they may run.
The complex panoply of these gray cables played itself
out on the overhead racks and vertical risers like a gigantic extruded
sculpture, demonstrating the almost impossible workmanship and cunning of the
installers who laboriously laid each wire. At their densest, the cable runs
were three feet wide and a foot thick of solid copper wires, each with its own
agenda.
On this particular floor of the Folsom Street CO,
however, those magnificently routed cables came to an untidy end where they
were severed, every last one of them, from the switching equipment below. The
junked equipment was destined to litter a salvage warehouse somewhere, and the
now-defunct cabling would be "mined", as the PacBell techs call it, for its
scrap-metal value and also to free up room on the overhead racks. Space in a
CO is always at a premium, and new expansion puts a formidable pressure on
older equipment whose functionality per cubic foot falls ever behind.
Up one floor from the cross-connect frames lay the first
wave of what starts to look like electronic telco equipment. Here are aisles
upon aisles of racks filled with modular boxes which hold the local-loop
termination equipment. Most of the T-1 and 56k dedicated circuits arrive here
to their designated cards, which provide diagnostic capabilities for
monitoring the circuits and other service functionality. The vertical
equipment racks stand 12 feet high, with rolling library ladders running down
each aisle for the technicians to use while working on the upper bays. Further
overhead are the ever-present cable trays and other structural bracing, and
illuminating each aisle are caged fluorescent lamps which serve as the only
light source in this otherwise windowless building.
Unlit Lamps are Good lamps
The circuit termination equipment is a dull array of
compartmentalized chassis, each holding a dozen or so plug-in modules the size
of a 3-1/2" hard disk. Most are either a dirty beige color or else simply
gray, with a few LED lights sprinkled here or there to indicate their
operational status. We noted that most of them appeared to be turned off,
until a PacBell tech indicated that the lights only went on when something was
wrong.
Contrast that to the average consumer audio component,
where a lack of attention-getting lights only meant that the product designer
didn't budget enough for LEDs. The telco equipment designers had the operators
in mind when they left the lights off - in a hundred foot wall of these things
the only thing a technician wants to see is a problem area, not a field of
warm little pilot lights whose only information is that the power still works.
A centralized monitoring system augments the status lights by logging all
failures or alarms to a console which gave the techs more detailed
information.
One thing that struck me about the racks of equipment
was the patchwork variations in the colors of the individual components, even
those from the same manufacturer. It became evident that there was a
considerable history of changes to the equipment over time, where one card
might fail and need to be replaced, or when newer units were added to the
racks. Each of the parts, when placed in service, was expected to remain there
until it either failed or needed to be upgraded for whatever reason, so there
were 20-year-old cards sitting there right along side brand new units.
PacBell isn't fussy about aesthetics, nor do they have
any sentiment about the individual components themselves. Whatever works is
left alone; otherwise it's coming out to be replaced by a different unit --
new or old -- that happens to be available for the job. Similarly, there were
many gaps where circuits were disabled for whatever reason, and the equipment
was re-purposed somewhere else on the racks. Part of the design specifications
for Central Offices is the notion of infinite serviceability, where nothing
goes to waste despite the constant changes to the service. One result of this
pragmatism is the mixed-bag appearance of the equipment racks - no impressive
expanses of uniform electronics to photograph for the annual report.
CAUTION: Corrosive Environment!
Also on this floor was one of the many areas set aside
for the batteries which carry the equipment through short power outages.
Everything in the CO runs on 48 volts DC, provided by the batteries. They
rested in heavy steel shelves stacked five feet high by twenty feet to a side,
like the battery storage shelves at the local automotive center. The
difference, of course, is that these batteries weren't simply idle, awaiting
the next customer order to take them away. They were all online, at full
charge, connected not by cables in this case but by fat copper bus bars.
There was one wall simply filled with giant fuses and
God's own knife switches, and the bus bars worked their way overhead to
intertwine with the air conditioning ducts, seismic bracing, light circuits,
ladder tracks, fire extinguishing apparatus, high-voltage electrical feeds,
and the ubiquitous cable trays. A monkey would have hit nirvana if he were
allowed to play in the industrial jungle-gym above, provided he could survive
the countless electrical hazards that permeated every corner. I wondered what
a well-placed crowbar would do to the exposed copper busses which fed the
equipment, but then again that's why PacBell employs a security guard at the
front desk to see that stray crowbars never enter the building.
We wandered with our guide up and down the narrow
aisles, only missing shopping carts to give us some grounding with reality. At
the ends of each aisle were low-tech overhead lighted signs which flashed
alarm messages should something become amiss. There were also lamp sockets
with bare orange bulbs installed to presumably warn of something more dire,
and in true CO fashion the sockets had many different varieties of wires
terminated around the base for some arcane purpose that only PacBell
understands. Down in the racks a technician showed us some of the circuit
termination modules, and pulled one from the chassis to explain its
operations.
We had learned first-hand what can happen when one of
these cards goes bad - we once ordered 24 phone lines delivered as a T1 to our
modem bank, and one of the channels displayed a bad relay chatter when it
picked up a call. It took us numerous days to finally troubleshoot the
problem, which turned out to be a bad card here in the Central Office. I had
naively assumed that when we ordered new phone service, PacBell trotted out
and bought new equipment at the CO just for us. Instead, they re-use dormant
equipment which a previous customer moved away from, which in this case
included one bad card out of the 24 installed. Nonetheless it was simple to
fix once identified -- a technician simply finds a working card somewhere and
slots it in place. So what if we had to pull our hair out while we tried to
zero in on the trouble area at our end.
Section 3: The Switch
The next floor up contained the whole reason for the
building's existence; The Switch. In reality, there are probably millions of
individual electronic switches contained in all of the equipment that controls
the telephone network. But in the telco world, all of the separate parts are
described as a single entity, regardless of its size, and the expression to
describe the sum total is simply, "the switch". You might
hear someone in the telecommunications industry talk about some facilities
somewhere, and describe what kind of "switch" is installed, where they are in
fact referring to the complete installation. So at 611 Folsom, The Switch is a
Northern Telecom DMS-100, which just happens to consume an entire floor of the
building.
[To be completely accurate, in this case, there are
actually two "switches" at the Folsom CO. This is just a logical distinction
that PacBell makes for their own purposes, but for most intents and purposes,
Central Offices generally house one logical switch that anyone cares to know
about.]
The DMS-100 is made up of many aisles of electronic
components, all tied together to a "superprocessor" which is the heart of the
system. Most of the components are simply replications of the modular cabinets
which contain all of the circuit cards that interface with the telephone
lines, while a few boxes house peripheral equipment such as memory or tape
drives. It is, in essence, a large computer whose principal purpose is to
simply switch circuits around for all the phone connections that get
established throughout the city. There are other tasks such as tying
long-distance calls to the appropriate carrier trunks, or passing off call
setup information to the call accounting equipment, but most of the job
entails serving the local phone network and providing those annoying
recordings that accompany misdialed numbers.
We expected to see an array of gleaming white cabinets
that one often stereotypes as a large-scale computer installation. The DMS-100
was
large, all right, but gleam it didn't. Instead it was an exceedingly ugly
brown color, sort of a dull milk-chocolate hue, with clashing bright green
trim at the ends of each aisle. I think it belittled the appearance of the
whole installation, as the room felt darker than it really was, and the aisles
of equipment cabinets looked more like something out of the 1950s. But again,
aesthetics is not high on the priority list at PacBell, so they had no problem
with the decor.
Not Quite Aerospace Technology
One of the main system operators took time to show us
the works, and explained how everything could be serviced on the fly, which is
what one would expect from the phone company. He pulled out a few processor
cards to show us where the individual circuit components plugged in, and also
showed us a few storage cabinets filled with spares. One quickly realizes by
looking at the components that telco equipment is the antithesis of what most
would consider to be cutting-edge technology. The circuit cards were large and
clunky, not using any surface-mount chips or exotic multi-layer boards.
Instead they were more like military hardware - ancient technology but with
years of tested reliability. They held no surprises, no hard-to-source
components, and no random reboots that PC users have come to embrace. The
uptime on the switch is probably measured in years, and the only event that
might halt it altogether is when the diesel generators downstairs run out of
fuel after the apocalypse.
We also saw a backup tape for the entire system, which
only contained about 40 MB of data. I would be willing to bet that
three-quarters of that is human-readable labels or comments. The switch's life
is a simple one compared to most general-purpose computers. There is no
memory-hogging GUI to deal with; the control terminals probably run some
dead-end version of COBOL code that Northern Telecom can never replace. A
five-year-old 386 might have more processing power than the entire system
itself, and I'm sure that if telecom switches ever became commodity items sold
through the fine-print ads of Microtimes, some clone manufacturer could
probably collapse the entire room-filling installation down to a half-dozen
minitower boxes. But while the DMS-100 might lack a modern workstation's
processing glamour, that baby beats everything else hands-down in I/O.
This floor of the building, like all the others we'd
seen, had its share of overhead cable racks and assorted structural clutter.
Many of the 25-pair cables that we'd seen on previous floors ended up here to
feed the switch. The most remarkable displays were a series of vertical wiring
chases that emerged from the floor and joined the fun overhead, but were
composed of solid rectangular clumps of the gray cables measuring 10 inches by
2 feet in cross section. Hundreds of the 25-pair cables were gathered in
layers, all tied off at one foot intervals to previous layers, and all ran
perfectly straight as if they were extruded out of smooth gray clay. I got the
impression that PacBell laid out dense vertical cable trunks for visual
effect, like an interior decorator might use fluted columns for architectural
detail.
High Fiber Content
We progressed up another floor from the switch to where
the digital fiber circuits terminated. This was a repeat of the other floors;
aisles of equipment racks filled with nondescript boxes, rolling ladders to
access the upper levels, and another side room filled with batteries. The
fiber equipment racks looked to be more modern than some of the earlier units
we'd seen, but it still had the appearance of all engineering and no style.
Scattered throughout the racks were testing consoles with patch cords hanging
from the front, and small CRT displays glowing against the dim surroundings.
After seeing a few aisles of OC-3 and OC-12 equipment, we asked to look at the
multiplexer that connected to our building at 350 Townsend.
A few aisles away were the boxes that served our
particular flavor of fiber, one sporting our building's address. The techs
happened to have the front panel open, with testing cards installed to perform
the little tests that PacBell likes to do when they get bored. Our T1 circuits
were humming along fine, with no unusual alarms or other indications of
problems. The equipment operator showed us another similar box, and pulled out
a termination card to show off how it worked. I was a little unnerved by the
enthusiasm that everyone at PacBell seemed to display when demonstrating how
simple it is to pull the cards out of the racks, but maybe that's why the
original equipment designers needed to build in all the redundant
functionality in the first place.
Also on this floor was another large cross-connect
frame, only this one was mostly devoid of wires. It apparently had been used
for other purposes a decade ago, but the continual changes and upgrades within
the CO moved it out of the overall picture. More noticeable instead were
yellow-colored cable trays overhead, which signified that they were used for
fiber-optic cables instead of copper. The equipment operator pointed out that
a narrow six inch wide cable tray full of fiber could carry the same total
volume of data traffic as all of the massive copper trunks bulging from the
ceilings below. This was truly an example of large-scale miniaturization, at
least as far as the transport media goes.
Furthermore, the fiber loops strung throughout the city,
along with all the termination equipment and multiplexers, were designed from
the start to embrace full operational redundancy, to the point where any one
break in a fiber circuit would be "healed" in milliseconds when its redundant
partner took over all the traffic automatically. He mentioned, however, that
the limited number of fiber loops currently deployed generally only reach
large business complexes where the overall number of circuits required can
justify the enormous expense of installing it all. Fiber circuits to most
residences won't happen for another five to ten years, and not at all to
remote rural locations. As impressive as the fiber-optic technology might be,
it will never match copper wire's low cost of deployment when only a few
individual circuits are involved.
Section 4: Frame Relay
Our final stop was up one more floor at the Frame Relay
equipment facility, a relative newcomer to 611 Folsom. First appearances of
the equipment suggested that its deployment was somewhat of an afterthought,
when one compared the smaller, untidy Frame Relay racks to the vast,
regimented arrays on the floors below. The big giveaway was the dropped
ceiling hanging over the racks, which could only mean that the space was not
originally planned as an equipment room, but instead grew out of some sort of
administrative office. There was a logical reason for the difference in
surroundings, however, which had to do with the nature of the technology.
Historically, The Phone Company (meaning AT&T at its
peak, but now also the Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs, and their
newer competitors) operated in a different universe from the rest of the
technology companies, and created its own standards for the equipment it used.
(See the sidebar on "Premise Equipment versus Central Office Equipment.")
All of the cable-handling facilities, equipment racks, modular chassis, and
switching gear was built exclusively for phone company use, and if private
industry wanted to pursue the telecommunications field, they'd just have to do
it on their own.
While the phone companies might not have arrived at the
most advanced technologies to solve their problems, they certainly built the
most serviceable and rugged equipment for their own use. Frame Relay is a
fairly new technology, and is applicable for private companies that wish to
consolidate their far-flung Wide Area Networks (WANs) as well as the phone
companies, who already support global-scale data networks. However, since a
lot of its development takes place in the private sector, as opposed to the
provincial halls of Bell Labs, Frame Relay equipment tends to have less of a
design investment in serviceability and rugged construction. The technology
simply changes too rapidly for the engineers to create an immutable standard
that everyone can expect to support for the next ten years.
Sirius uses Frame Relay as a means to serve customers
who are beyond our local calling zones, and it substitutes for point-to-point
dedicated lines by using a state-wide data "cloud" that PacBell has already
established. While it travels over existing fiber facilities that PacBell
needed to install anyway for their growing voice/data traffic, Frame Relay
manages packet-based traffic in a different manner that allows it to optimize
unused bandwidth in a distance-independent way. This is a different avenue
from how the circuit-centric phone companies normally operate, and accordingly
the technology is unlike what they've been deploying for the past 75 to 100
years on the phone poles. The Frame Relay room at 611 Folsom was thus more of
a laboratory than a full-scale Central Office installation, which manifested
itself through the untidy cables dangling from the overhead trays and the
mismatched equipment populating the racks, looking suspiciously like temporary
additions.
Virtual Nets
PacBell's Frame Relay "cloud" (telco jargon used to
describe any sort of Wide Area Network, whose inner workings are irrelevant in
the context of its discussion) had a fair amount of equipment representation
within this room. One of our Frame Relay customers in Santa Rosa happens to
connect to equipment which resides not in Santa Rosa but at 611 Folsom,
despite the fact that his local circuit is only billed to his nearest CO.
Other PacBell localities in California also have their
Frame Relay equipment in this room, which routes the data and then sends the
appropriate traffic back to their respective CO's. At this time, it is less
expensive for PacBell to take advantage of unused bandwidth in their
state-wide fiber network than it is to set up Frame Relay facilities
everywhere, so they shuttle the data to a centralized location like 611 Folsom
and then backhaul everything through the vacant fiber pipes. This strategy
will undoubtedly change as the volume grows to the point where any emerging
location can justify its own switching facilities, but for now the whole show
is run in a few concentrated equipment rooms located in key COs.
Pacific Bell, despite its conservative approach to
standard voice traffic switching (such as the DMS-100 switch and all its
associated bulk), is actually one of the nation's pioneers for new
technologies such as Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). They
work closely with vendors who design the equipment, and by their sheer size
happen to be one of the largest installations in the U.S.A. for new network
technologies. But this evolutionary divergence from the established telco path
poses a lot of new twists for a company whose main revenue is generated over
lowly copper wires.
In the past, PacBell solved its equipment deployment
problems by a variation of brute force, namely over-engineered electronic
boxes which they could depend on not changing over a decade time-frame. When
all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but unfortunately ATM,
Frame Relay, and now Internet traffic don't comply gracefully with entire
floors full of technology from the 1970s and 1980s. My sense is that the Frame
Relay and ATM equipment room at 611 Folsom is the new little mammal-thing to
PacBell's traditional local-loop dinosaur, but they seem to be making the best
of it.
Constant Changes
While this room may have appeared somewhat low-rent in
comparison to the grandiose switch room downstairs, they were tearing down
adjoining walls to make space for additional equipment. These will likely be
one generation newer than the existing Frame Relay boxes, and ten generations
newer then the DMS-100. It's only a matter of time before technicians start
hacking away at the colossal trunks of copper two floors down to clear the way
for some newfangled optical call router with the Dyna-Sych IP option.
Our tour was over and we left the CO with a new
appreciation of how the local phone system works, as well as an insight of why
it takes two weeks just to order a new phone line. What goes on inside is
either an engineer's triumph, or nightmare, depending on your perception of
technology. 611 Folsom takes the notion of "Form Follows Function" to perverse
extremes, and from a grand design view it is as impressive an engineering
accomplishment as any pyramid during its era. The only comparisons that come
to mind in terms of sheer complexity are perhaps a nuclear power plant or a
battleship, but no one would feel too comfortable having either of those
nestled in their urban neighborhood.
Phone companies seem to live by the credo, "If it ain't
broke, don't fix it." Yet there are enormous pressures from accelerating
technologies to advance into areas that run counter to their normal mode of
operation. It is to the phone company's credit that they adopted an infinitely
adaptable equipment architecture early on, in the form of standardized racks
and open cabling facilities, and now they'll have to put that flexibility to
use as new equipment displaces the older behemoths. One thing will never
change, however, and that is the requirement to wire it all together. On that
basis alone I would guess that this unsightly box of a building has more human
labor invested per cubic foot than the Pyramids themselves.
--Don Hurter is Construction Engineer at Sirius
Connections and has cut more cables than he cares to count.
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