New Telephone System

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 14

New Telephone System

Calls for tenders for one of the largest con- 1 tracts negotiated by the New Zealand Post Office are being circulated to telephone exchange manufacturers on the world market.

Equipment covered by the contract will eventually affect the whole of New Zealand’s telephone network, with the possibility of such facilities as national pushbutton dialling and generally more efficient services. General and detailed specifications for the project took Post Office engineers and

technicians 18 months to draw up and are contained in almost 1000 pages of documents. The specifications were circulated this week to commercial attaches of diplomatic missions, New Zealand representatives of telephone manufacturing equipment firms, and to overseas companies. Manufacturers will be given until February, 1971, to tender for the contract. It will then take post office stores evaluation experts and engineers up to six months to assess and negotiate the tenders. The new crossbar equipment will become standard

for the New Zealand telephone network, supplementing the present step-by-step exchange system which cannot be developed further economically to supply all the facilities of a modern telephone network. With the step-by-step system each digit in the number is processed as it is dialled. The crossbar system provides for complete numbers to be registered and fed into the network for processing. Should switching difficulties develop on one route, crossbar equipment has, for example, the ability automatically to seek an alternate route without the subI scriber being aware of it.