New telephone exchange will add 16 000 lines

The Herald, October 17, 1992

MORE than 16 000 new telephone subscribers in Harare will benefit from the Julius Nyerere Way digital exchange when commissioned next year.

The Unit 7 exchange would reduce the number of people on the telephone waiting list in Harare by almost half. The backlog now stands at more than 37 000.

The completion of the exchange would improve the quality of the telephone service and also reduce the backlog in the central business area, the deputy postmaster-general (telecommunications planning and manufacturing), Cde Joshua Chideme, said after taking the Minister of Information, Posts and Telecommunications, Cde David Karimanizira, on a tour of the exchange and Harare Main Post Office.

Unit 7 exchange consists of a central maintenance and operation centre, a digital exchange and a local transit switch. Equipment installed in the three sections cost the PTC about $25 million.

The operation centre, for monitoring digital exchanges countrywide, would have an alarm display equipment with the map of Zimbabwe, and on it would be a visual, audible and a printout alarm.

Cde Chideme said the local exchange would have 21 700 subscriber lines of which 5 000 have already been taken.

The local transit switch which interconnects the Julius Nyerere Way exchange and other satellite exchanges would have 10 000 lines. 

Apart from the Unit 7 exchange, Harare will have seven other digital exchanges, namely Avondale, Borrowdale, Highlands, Glen View, Kuwadzana, Cranborne and a trunk exchange in the city centre.

LESSONS FOR TODAY 

 The landline network was originally a purely circuit-switched telephone network, over which individual participants’ lines were (manually, and later automatically) connected together to make calls.

The advent of digitisation and the increasing demand for data transmission has transformed the fixed-line network into a universal, integrated services network. 

Despite the increasing use and popularity of cellphones as the preferred medium for communication, fixed line telephones have remained relevant with 931 million still in service with China, the United States and Germany being the top three countries where they are in use.