OPX lines, low volume

[marcshunk]

I have a couple of dozen OPX lines that go through my Meridian1 switch, over several miles of leased copper to another facility. All of the lines have always had low volume (especially on long distance calls). This has been "corrected" on an as needed basis by giving the complaining party an amplified handset. Is there any other way to simply solve this problem for all 20 odd lines? These lines are actually trunks that arrive at the original facility with good volume (-3Db) go through the switch (-4.5Db) and then arrive at the next facility (-6 to -6.5Db) and then punched down here and there throughout the building to arrive at the set at about -6Db or so. These measurements were made with the 1000HZ from the local CO. Long distance is several Db worse at every step.

 

[SYQUEST]

Hi marcshunk,

First of all since the pairs are leased as ckts from a telco or service provider, you need to get them to redesign the loops with voice repeaters on each one with no more than -3.0dB loss end-to-end. I would start by opening trouble tickets with repair service and escalate from there. Over the years this has always been a problem with off-prem stations on copper. The losses are additive so you want to make sure your trunks have good levels also. Whenever I ordered OPS ckts from the telco, I always specified a -3.0dB loss design - NO EXCEPTIONS - Since you mentioned levels I assume you have test equipment to do measurements. But with only one TIMMS that could limit you somewhat.

You have another option here and that is to move all the off-prem stations to a point-to-point T1 ckt. I believe Northern Telecom makes a T1 station card for the M1 switches. I know they make one for trunks! (Why they did not just use one card for both I have never figured out.) On the station end you would use a channel bank with FXS cards and on the switch end use the T1 card. There are some nice channel bank packages available. One that comes to mind is the Carrier Access ADIT600 which has lots of flexibility and can support 2-T1s for a total of 48 channels and is very small.

Now obviously there are costs involved with this. Not knowing what your situation is, changing to a T1 could save you or your customer money and provide more options if you needed to haul data to/from the same location. Plus you are in control of the levels at this point and can taylor the design as needed.

Hope this helps!
JIM

 

[Bobg1]

I have to agree with syquest on getting telco to to get the line levels where they belong. Also agreee on the other option.
I found a point to point t1 with a channel bank ended up costing quite a bit less in the longer run then opx lines.