[asterisk-users] Large Asterisk installarions (~10, 000 extensions), preferably at universities

[RE Kushner List Account]

Yehavi Bourvine wrote:
>
> Thanks to everyone who replies so far!
>  
> We have Nortel PBX'es with a support contract from one of the local 
> VARs (Nortel does not give direct support here). In the last two weeks 
> we had one of our exchanges down for three half days; one was after a 
> failure, and the other two were when the technician came to fix 
> remainders of the original problem and just did a "5 seconds restart 
> which won't even cut calls". Yeh, the "5 seconds" took 6-7 hours... 
> BTW, they still do not know what was the original problem.
>  

Well, as everyone knows people don't generally have long memories, but I 
do.  Back in the 1980s Northern Telecom installed a DMS-100 for 
Ameritech in Southfield, Michigan. Somewhere along the way the switching 
matrix was somehow undersized, fingers pointed both ways and heated 
words were exchanged between companies.  Internally the switch was 
called Yo-Yo by the Ameritech employees.

Just because you spent millions of dollars on a solution doesn't 
guarantee you five nines. Sometimes it costs millions more just to make 
it work right, both in fines and vendor fixes.

Because of the Southfield fiasco when the largest exchange came up years 
later the contract went to AT&T Bell Labs to install the largest 5ESS in 
the world in the Royal Oak exchange. Nortel wasn't even considered. 
Nortel also lost quite a bit of Ameritech business to the Siemens EWSD. 
Ameritech's Ohio Bell wouldn't even touch the DMS-100 for many years 
because of what happened in Southfield. This was at a time when all the 
switches needed to go digital to reduce power costs and comply with 
federal law, so there was a urgency to get hardware in place ASAP. Even 
with the pressure the DMS-100 was avoided.

Due diligence is required on anything 10,000 people are going to be 
pounding on. Undersizing is common, and is only one of the roads that 
leads to Hell (I prefer Patterson Lake Road myself since I drive in from 
the North East).

-Ron