What Are They Operating? (primarily for BTInternet users)

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Just out of curiosity…..

 

When one starts BTInternet, if any system maintenance is underway the notice is accompanied by the attached image (with acknowledgements to the company): two gentlemen in smoking-jackets and headphones, operating an impressive mass of electronickery.

Their dress and the nature of the equipment, much of it occupying umpteen similar MU-standard rack-mounted boxes, suggests 1950s – early 1960s. We cannot see what the men are actually operating – keyboards? – but the big panel is an intriguing collection of patch-panels and flying-leads, rotary switch knobs, telephone dials and the like.

 

The place does not seem to be a telephone-exchange, with the dapper gentlemen using the test-desk. The racks along the sides are not of Strowger selectors, and the photograph looks too early for the first electronic exchanges. Nor does that control panel look like a Post Office Telephones exchange test-desk.

An early, perhaps experimental, computer?

Broadcast, military or air-traffic control radio station?

Anyone know what the installation was, or was likely to have been?

[peter1972Participant @peter1972]

According to this document it was scramling equipment:

https://www.wondersofworldengineering.com/international_exchange.html

And according to this document it was in Faraday House international telephone exchange in London:

https://www.bt.com/bt-plc/assets/documents/about-bt/our-history/bt-archives/bt-heritage-and-archives-postcards.pdf

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Wonderful! Thankyou very much!

I have read those you cite, and bookmarked them.

[Robert Atkinson 2Participant @robertatkinson2]

Apparently standards have dropped when it comes to securing long distance communications links:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/unencrypted_satellite_comms/?td=rt-3a

Robert.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Standards have dropped even within the country.

It seems more and more common for interviews conducted by telephone by programmes like Today, to break down. The analogue, all-metallic, telephone systems were not “hi-fi” and never pretended to be, but I do not recall many calls just dropping out or being too distorted for clarity as now seems increasingly frequent.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Standards have indeed dropped! But I submit the problem is rose-tinted memory.

Robert forgets that only one radio telephone link in the world was encrypted, and that by frequency inversion, which is a doddle to reverse.  All other telephony was en-clair, as was most telegraphy.  Unless you were a spy, military or diplomat.  The incident Robert alludes to was a mistake, not ‘standards dropping’.

Nigel memory of POTS is amiss!  Crossed lines, crackle, drop-outs, and number unobtainable were usual!   I worked in a HQ with many outstations and wasted ages on the phone.  I’d call the operator and ask “can I have a line to Portsmouth please?”.  The answer was usually “NO, try later”.  And the operators would interrupt calls to ask if we’d finished yet.  Important messages were sent by Telex, not  phone.   The Plain Old Telephone System was so unreliable in the 70’s that broadcasters rarely risked it live.  The reason we hear lines fail today is that reliability is judged ‘good enough’, which it mostly is.

On average technology is much better today than it was in the past.   And much cheaper…

We get grumpy as we age.   Mind you, in my school we all sat in neat rows, apple-cheeked in Eton collars, paying attention, and learning stuff much harder than today’s brats can cope with.  We respected our elders, never cheeked the beak or mumbled, kept our socks up, and ate our greens.   Short trousers until the Lower Sixth.  No smoking, drinking or girls until we where finally accepted as adults, aged forty something…

I love heritage steam railways.   But the real steam system rarely ran on time and was filthy, noisy, and slow.   Nothing like the Orient Express.  Remember “Brown Windsor Soup” and curly sandwiches?

🙂

Dave

 

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

I did not say the old all-wire telephone system was perfect, and the speech was usually somewhat distorted. One curious effect was of broadening regional accents. The problems you cite would seem to be of overcrowding by demand exceeding supply. I do admit though having never made a call using operator services. Whether from private or public telephones I remember only Subscriber Trunk Dialling through Automatic Telephone Exchanges. So were your business calls via a manual, “Private Branch Exchange” within your own premises? Those lasted well beyond the days of universal ATEs on the public network; so you can’t blame Post Office Telephones / British Telecommunications for inefficiency there.

However, the number of failed or unintelligble radio-programme interviews or call-ins by ‘phone seems increasing when one might expect the service to be generally improving. When it works well, it is good, but no man-made system can ever be perfect and the more complicated, the more prone to breakdowns not readily repairable (if at all). “Good enough” could mean anything from extremely reliable to vague hope; serious attention to quality or a slapdash approach.

Indeed, in making my own arrangements for the Exhibition I learnt that no less than two e-posts and two phone-calls had failed to arrive. (No they were not hidden as messages, in “spam” or anything like that.)

On my way to the show I had arranged to visit another user of this very Forum to collect some engineering bits. I discovered he lives in a deep valley in which no radio-telephony (including “sat-nag” and WhatThree Words) is possible, and where BT has removed the equipment from the public call-boxes. I had to drive back up the hill to be able to ring him for directions.

 

Were trains in steam-hauled day always delayed? Probably no more than now; though it was easier to recover a failed train than now, or to arrange diversions. The official BR steam-locomotive operating manual even has a chapter on temporary repairs to broken motion-work! Well, on outside valve-gear perhaps.

Slower, yes, because the locomotives lacked the power of their Diesel and electric replacements; and fog was a major obstruction in the days when it could obscure paraffin-lit semaphore signals.

Yet we are forever hearing of complaints about today’s much faster trains often being cancelled for all sorts of reasons, usually stated. One train I was using was delayed for half an hour by some useless scum (probably brats in a housing estate bordering the line) having dragged an old sofa up the embankment and placed it on the track. We hit it, although fortunately the driver had spotted it far enough ahead to have slowed the train from likely >90mph to perhaps 10mph at impact.

At another delay, this time by a broken-down train obstructing ours, I asked a station official if they can’t simply use the nearest freight locomotive to tow the breakdown to a safe station to clear the route and allow the passengers to change to the following train. He explained that modern rolling-stock is no longer standard and compatible – then added “That’s privatising for you!”

One of the most common cause of delays is the least published: suicides!

Cleanliness? Large towns were filthy anyway due to the enormous amount of coal being burnt, not only in locomotives and the local gas-works, but also more, and far less efficiently, in household fireplaces. Nowadays the carriages are usually kept clean; but the worst mess and dirt inside is from litter-lout passengers, and externally also from graffiti-louts and fly-tippers.

…

Returning to telephones though; Big Business is now so consumed by money and internal “efficiency” run by people who have never know any other ways, that organisations right, left and centre are pushing us ever more to living glued to a “smart”-‘phone or PC. Well, yes, the instruments look smart. It really means more and more done with fewer and fewer alternatives, sometimes with less and less ease, with the inevitably increasing risk of finding oneself suddenly unable to do or obtain something; or of major breakdowns or indeed attacks having far wider consequences than the immediate.

“Progress”? Yes, in its true sense, of chronological succession. “Progress” in the metaphorical sense, as improvement? That remains to be seen, but I have my doubts.

[Robert Atkinson 2]

On Robert Atkinson 2 Said:

Apparently standards have dropped when it comes to securing long distance communications links:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/14/unencrypted_satellite_comms/?td=rt-3a

Robert.

PGP printed out and sent as described in RFC 1149 is the gold standard

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