Another thing to be aware of when adding cards is that your NCUI/LTUC cards are in slot 6 on AP shelves, and 7 on local shelves. Each cabinet has 256 timeslots. there are 128 timeslots on each side of slot 6/7. I may be a little off the mark, but each event (phone off the hook, dialing, receiving, or talking) uses 1 timeslot. The newer Analog boards have 24 ports, so theoretically you can have no more than 5 analog boards on each side of Slot 6/7, with an assumption that all of them will be off the hook or ringing at once. A large number of analog boards on the same shelf will probably also require a ring generator card for power needs, or additional power supplies down below - I'm by no means an expert here. With analog it is more trivial, but consider when you are working with STMI4 cards that can support 240 HFA phones per card - you have to carefully consider how many of those phones could possibly be off the hook at once. If more than 128 are off the hook on either side of slot 6/7 it is possible the next person who picks up the phone will not get dial tone - this is called "blocking", and when phone systems are designed by geeky engineering types they are designed around these timeslots, and highways that manage them and all kinds of other factors above our heads (blocking factor or percentage of blocking). So the moral of the long winded story is you have to be careful when just adding more cards - even though the system will let you do it there could be unexpected consequences of not looking at the big picture of the whole shelf. Then there are memory limits for how many phones and quantities of each different type of object in the system, which you can see with DIS-DIMSU; - that will show you what the capacities are the system was originally set up for and how many are currently in use. If you want to add more than those numbers you need to change those values, and that is another area where you want to be wary of going too big, because that affects the working memory of the whole system...
Don Bruechert, Voice Comm Analyst II
CareTech Solutions @ Holy Family Memorial
Manitowoc, WI, USA
