Google making it easy to find your Exchange

DrJohnZoidberg

DrJohnZoidberg

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Drove the other day to drop somebody off and went past what I thought was the local telkom exchange, but it was dark and wasn't too sure, so decided to see if I could go there on Google street view. S'true as Bob found it in a view clicks. Nice image quality too.

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=5368

Pity I don't live a closer, I'm about 3km's away - still waiting for my adsl to be activated, so will have to see then how stable the line is.
 
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Srack0verflow

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i dont know much about these things, but i think there's much more than DSL going on there, the exchanges i know are way smaller without a radio tower anywhere close-by.
 
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Sting

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timvdwest said:
Pity I don't live a closer, I'm about 3km's away - still waiting for my adsl to be activated, so will have to see then how stable the line is.
Click to expand...

To provide ADSL to folks a bit further from this brick and mortar exchange building, telco's (including Telkom) install "concentrator" units between those customers and their building in order to reduce the length of copper cable required.

These are mostly called UMC's, which effectively shortens the distance between you and the exchange. The UMC's are normally a grey street box and are linked to the exchange via optic fibre cable and to your house via copper cable.

I'm not saying this is the scenario in your case. Also remember that it might be 3km as you travelled, but the copper cable route could be much longer!
 
kilos

kilos

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K

K3NS31

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let's all find our Exchanges and put them on Google maps. We can get the whole country mapped out.
 
MickeyD

MickeyD

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K3NS31 said:
let's all find our Exchanges and put them on Google maps. We can get the whole country mapped out.
Click to expand...
Define exchange.... e.g. in kilos' pic, the box on the far left is a remote exchange (DLU). The box second from the right is a UMC (remote DSLAM). Bigger UMC's look very similar to remote DLU's. The newer "remote DSLAMs" are IMAX units. It gets very confusing to distinguish between them all, but you can safely rule out all blue/green cabinets and any red cabinets!!

There are thousands of these!!
 
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K3NS31

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MickeyD said:
Define exchange.... e.g. in kilos' pic, the box on the far left is a remote exchange (DLU). The box second from the right is a UMC (remote DSLAM). Bigger UMC's look very similar to remote DLU's. The newer "remote DSLAMs" are IMAX units. It gets very confusing to distinguish between them all, but you can safely rule out all blue/green cabinets and any red cabinets!!

There are thousands of these!!
Click to expand...

I dunno, I guess we just need to be able to check google maps to see if we're close enough to something to get good adsl speeds (I can already see this being a big priority when next I move - "yes Honey, it's a lovely house, and it's going for a song, but the ADSL's gonna be too slow")
 
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