No. 10A Remote Switching System: System Maintenance

1.1 Maintenance objectives Overall system requirements and objectives for the 10A Remote Switching System (RSS) are detailed in Ref. 1. From a maintenance standpoint, the objective is to provide continuous and reliable telephone service throughout the life of the system, while providing maintenance capabilities equivalent to those of other ESS systems. That is, the system must be both highly dependable and easily maintainable. The maintainability objective is to have a system in which troubles, when they occur, are easily located and sectionalized, and repair operations can be completed quickly by craft without extensive training in RSS. It is a further objective that the RSS maintenance plan be as consistent as possible with existing Bell operating company procedures for maintaining switching systems and fit the organizational structures and maintenance support systems expected to exist in the 1980s. 597 1.2 Overview The No. 10A RSS maintenance plan is similar to that of other Bell System electronic switching systems in its reliance upon hardware duplication of critical system components and its use of program control for fault detection, recovery, and support of repair operations. The RSS is unique, however, in that its various subsystems can be physically separated by up to 280 miles,2 and the maintenance plan must make provisions for the day-to-day operation and repair of separate parts of the system by different craft forces. For this reason, proper maintenance of the RSS will require considerably more coordination among various Bell operating company maintenance forces than earlier electronic switching systems.