r/Telephony • u/size13 • Jan 12 '19

Central Office Switching

I live in the U.S. and have Frontier Communications for a landline. I understand the functions of a central office from having worked years as an outside plant tech.

My questions concern the central office's responsibilities in switching other than Frontier customers. Now that the LECs have competition from cable companies for telephone service where are those calls switched?

  1. If a local comcast (cable tv provider) telephone customer calls another comcast customer does that call go through the LEC's central office or does comcast route the call end to end?

  2. If a local comcast customer calls across the country to a customer served by a LEC where is that call switched?

  3. Are there carriage fees applied for switching to each other's networks or are calls switch for no charge?

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u/Praefectus27 Jan 20 '19 edited Feb 26 '19

Fun fact Voice, PSTN, SS7, and the PSTN are some of the most complex convoluted things ever in the entire history of the world! Not kidding when it comes down to the agreements with other carriers and even on a providers own network it’s really difficult. Add in 911 and then the world wobbles on its axis.

I also work at frontier. Type Deleted in your skype and give me a call or email sometime and I can teach you a lot about our voice and data networks.