Telstra kills ZOMBIE BOXES all over Australia The fire that took out a major regional exchange last year has inspired Telstra to start building bigger mobile exchanges for future emergencies – and it's also revealed that there's a bunch of redundant hardware still consuming carbon around the country. The 2012 fire in the Warrnambool exchange showed up various holes in the …
I wonder if all the drop in power was due to 'zombie' equipment not being replaced or if the replacement (and more modern) items were simply less power hungry.
This is a very good example of why money spent on dull and dreary audits can save money for a company. Perhaps they didn't do audits before because of 'cost saving' measures. As every good executive knows, it's important to improve the bottom line quickly, soon after you start and before you move on.
Given how many techs Telstra has axed through redundancies and privatisation of services, it doesn't surprise me that there are scads of these zombie devices floating around in exchanges. The other bonus may well be that they can take their huge exchange buildings and shrink them down to a cabinet the size of the ones they are talking about for the NBN FTTN model.
You get the benefit of forced concentration too. Where there's a platform in decline you might have four boxes supporting a product, each capable of handling 1000 connections but now with just 100 or so on each box. If you're forced to replace those boxes you'll put them on a single, smaller box. If there's no fire or other disaster, why would you spend any Capex on a platform in decline when what is there works just fine?
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