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Comment by blablabla123 | Hacker News Reader

... and belong to AT&T with many cables going there :D

I live in a town of about 5,000 that is 15 minutes from a city of 200,000 and we have an AT&T building in our small downtown. It's about the same size as the frozen yogurt place next door, but it has two 1000+ gallon gas tanks sitting outside. I've lived here for years and never seen anyone go in or out, and the sign on the door says that packages should be delivered to the tavern next door. The door itself has blacked out windows.

It's super weird. I'm not saying it's a spy room, I guess it could be a tiny datacenter or switching building, but it's still super weird.

I live in a village of similar population in the UK and our telephone exchange looks just like a bungalow, situated on the end of a road dotted with similar houses. It's set back further from the road with tall hedging but I managed to cycle past it for eight years without even realising what it was. Weird, but in an opposing way :-)

In the days of Strowger switches, their clacking racket would have blasted you from the bike ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch

I doubt it. I walked past a large strowger exchange building as a school kid every day in the UK heard nothing from outside.

Wild stuff, never knew about these old mechanisms. Doesn't seem too loud however. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNNKLuM8yY8

A room full of those, piled up in columns/towers seven or eight feet tall, gets pretty loud.

But yeah, as mentioned, a building with decent insulation can contain the noise. A flimsy cottage, probably not.

Try https://archive.org/details/EastLangtonUax13TelephoneExchang... That's a standard UK rural exchange. Capacity 100 lines! The last few decomissioned went, in full working condition, to museums.

Background noise is the motors for the tone generator, probably the cable compressor too. The louder noises are the call routing and reset. Background noise would normally be a fair bit louder - I'm guessing he had mic right up against the rack for this.

Or a town exchange: https://youtu.be/xUOh9fCSgqw

Towns had much larger exchanges, and they were loud. Probably enough to have hearing loss if you worked there. Only visited one once, decades ago.

Also had a distinctive smell - machine oil, burnt electrics (50v), solvents. Lovely.

What an irony that this was invented to prevent fiddling about with things, considering how fouled up it all got.

Another example: here is a water pumping station disguised as a home in Raleigh, NC: http://wunc.org/post/video-whats-inside-house-wade-avenue

People used to enter those and document what was inside. That was stopping at the end of the 1990s, but 9/11 really made it trickier to do.

I think somewhere on textfiles.com there's a file by possibly kelticphr0st about those buildings.

If you've got time, I would be really interested in this ;-)

Having worked in the telco world for a bit, I wouldn't say that your description is unusual for a remote site. Generator backup is typical, and a switching office usually isn't manned, so it makes sense that they would arrange for packages to be delivered next door. Window tinting sounds nefarious, but truly could be done just to reduce HVAC load from solar heat. It's also nice to not advertise the pair of $100k+ Cisco or Juniper big iron routers that could be in there.

The amount of equipment that makes up most telco networks is actually pretty incredible. There are tons of small, unmanned sites that house switches, routers, and fiber amplifiers.

That said, I don't doubt that there are tons of sites that look just like this and actually do have something to hide.

That's what I figure, I just thought I'd bring it up in context of the description of the room in the linked article. It sounds just the same, so it's really difficult to determine what is a bad place and what is a normal place. Again, that's likely by design.

> That said, I don't doubt that there are tons of sites that look just like this and actually do have something to hide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Quick question for you: I've noticed that in most cities there's at least one nondescript, windowless brick building with 70's era architecture and some connection to a telephone company. Examples: [1] [2] [3] Now, those were probably made back in the days when everything was built from mechanical switches, or at best, transistors. What do they do with all that space when modern, miniaturized tech comes to town? Are they just filled with cobwebs and bits of ancient mainframe computers nowadays?

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6767102,-122.2095201,3a,75y,...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Museum+of+Communications/@...

[3] https://www.google.com/maps/place/AT%26T+Long+Lines+Building...

I truly have no clue. My direct experience is in network operations in the satellite communications industry, which tangentially exposed me to more traditional telcos. I couldn't speak with authority on what those buildings do nowadays.

Often, replaced with fiber patch bays, DSLAMs, etc. Then you have the same gear duplicated for CLECs that have colocation. At one point AT&T was claiming that COs were full/that there was no more space for CLEC colocation.

In larger cities some were repurposed as MSCs for cell service.

- Some of that space is now filled with networking gear, since phone companies are ISPs via DSL, FiOS, etc. Since this implies a lot of internet bandwidth coming into the building, they might also lease some of the space and network capacity to other companies who co-locate their own servers and networking gear there.

- The backhaul equipment that connects cellular networks to the landline phone/internet networks may also be in those buildings. (Some big carriers, e.g., Verizon, provide both landline and cellular services.)

- Some of that space is taken up by backup power supplies (batteries and/or generators) to keep the system going during power outages.

- Some of the space may be used for storage of supplies used for maintaining the local phone network.

What you're describing is the ILEC CO.

Sounds like a telephone company central office where all the local copper wires land.

Agreed. Here's what one looks like where I used to live: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.685061,-105.9393468,3a,75y,5... .

Centrally located, no public entrances, and no windows. I imagine the lack of windows also helps make it more secure, and less vulnerable to vandalism.

Here's what the local CO looks like in my hometown (~6K people). It was still a SxS switch when I was in high school (early 90s) but has since been upgraded; I presume most of the building is empty at this point and it's just used as staging for repair parts (see the pic of the back fenced-in area).

http://imgur.com/a/MMSK4

And it's not surprising you'd never see anyone come or go. These offices typically don't have permanent staff; technicians stop by for maintenance as needed.

> I'm not saying it's a spy room

Oh it is totally a data collection point.

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