End of an Era | BT Heritage 

And in 2018, my phone line was cut and removed from the property, as the copper wire network was to be decommissioned, and on a day the copper was removed, fibre optic installed and never again will dial tone be heard, 2 sounds never to be heard again, dial tone and dial up on a 56k modem, RIP telephones, thank you for your service..

Came for the telephony equipment, stayed for the groovy AF sixties music

Back then it was a pleasure to go to work. I'm overcome with nostalgia for those days...

Last time i saw this it was on roll of film being transferred to video on a telecine unit i ran for BTHeritage

The jumps in sound make the music sound like it’s in all sorts of avant garde time signatures.

Astonishing to see the rope based commission/decommission methods!

I'm on BT digital voice & still running a BT746 Telephone complete with twin bell ringing & dial tone. Not dead yet 😊😊

This exchange had a maximum of 10,000 phones connected to it. You can tell it by looking at the size of the new permutation racks, or more precisely, by looking at the power supply current meter, which shows 180 Ampere of current. Our analogue phone lines are powered by -48 V DC, with a line current of 20 mA, or 0.02 A each. So, with 180 Amps, 9000 phones are connected concurrently. In many places, the limit of 10K phone terminals max has been a lingering problem until electromechanical exchanges have been replaced with the actual computerised types, which uses in-band DMTF (multi-tone) for dialing, and are capable of carrying caller ID information and later, ADSL for data and Internet. Very slowly the PSTN are being replaced by their fully digital counterparts. This change impacts the customers negatively, as all telephone terminals in homes must be replaced. In certain cases, the terminal needs electrical power. The wisdom, at this point, should be to replace this "last mile" directly with a fiber optic.

The company i worked for disassembled most of the BT exchanges back in the 90's , the amount of money they made from scrapping was astronomical.

Brings back memories! I worked on a manual exchange and then worked on a modern one until I started Nurse Training.

9:50 If my last name was "Lillicrap", I would change it. 15:00 E II R, 1968. That is a beautiful touch, one we will never see again. Farewell to the Queen!

When i started work in 73 we ìnstalled new floors of strowger in various exchages

Theme music is class

I didn't realise manual exchanges lasted that long!

Happy memories of commissioning STC TXK3 and TXK4 switches around Glasgow and Leeds in late 70s. Converted to TXE4 and then TXE4a early 80s then off to Saudi Arabia to commission PRX-A 205 and 5ESS-PRX #goodolddays

I spent over 40 years with outside business telephone systems. We went from rooms as big as parlors to video recorder size equipment that handle 1000 times more telephones, than no phones at all just programs on computers. One thing for sure as telephone equipment progressed alot of jobs were lost.

Nice video. Thanks for posting it.

As a 40 year old, obviously I've never experienced this, but my goodness we came a long way and I must say it's refreshing to see this even though I wasn't around then. The changeover from manual to automatic exchange was really a very big project, no margin for error, even though there must have been a fallback. But credit to those who were involved in this. I wonder those telephone operators, the changeover to be honest meant job losses, I wonder how they transitioned to another job or changed careers.

The Party at the end looked good !

Only a few years ago AT&T abandoned the buried copper lines in my rear yard and installed fiber optic lines in the front, & into my living room. Never thought I would see a fiber optic line into my single family home. That is amazing. I think by 1970 only a few long distance calls still used an operator in the USA. Now, nearly all that mechanical equipment is history. I worked with a man who had been employed as a telephone operator. We were just starting off at a rather low paying government job. I asked him why he quit a job paying substantially more, and was surprised to hear him say that he couldn't take all the verbal abuse from customers. He said it gradually got to him, so he quit.

I’m 56 now and I was trained on plug boards Plessy and monarch switchboards when I was working for HSBC few months I used to press system

very interesting...

"If only Post Office engineers were so attractive..."

11:54 It's interesting that they play dramatic music for the engineers to listen to while they perform the changeover to the new system.

Love the moggie 1000s. The rope disconnect method too, hi tech😂.

I'm legally changing my name to H.G. Lillicrap

Nice!

AT&T started implementing crossbar switching in the late 1930s & was already moving in the direction of replacing it with electronic switching at the time this film was made. It would be interesting to know why the UK held back for so long.

I worked at st Botolphs telex exchange.. I use the term “worked” loosely bc most of our time was spent in city pubs

Pity the soundtrack is out of sync..

And by the end of 2025 that new automatic telephone exchange will be replaced by VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) system.

The narrator managed to say "Mr. Lillicrap" WITHOUT laughing! ... I certainly couldn't! 🤣

Soon the new building will be gone. The Exchange equipment went during the 1980/90. The lines where transferred to the system X at Romford.

06:00 Cranbourne Gardens Upminster - windmill is Grade II listed.

Sad how the job went to the dogs - I finished up as a C3 (TO) riding round chaining stepladders up so that contractors couldn't use them! BT were never any good at utilising the skills that employees were trained to do - it pretty well all went to contract.

A poorly trained operator shown at 9:18 - she pushed a plug home by the cord, not the plug. This causes cord faults - often frustratingly intermittent.

15:32 crossbar equipment and racks looks the same as installed at Plessey Kingsthorpe Northampton summer 1973

this too will happen too when the GB/UK goes to fibre service in 2025....

There was a windmill in Upminster?! Phone training too 😂

This film is dated 1970. It says the exchange is the first to get crossbar. But the relays shown are the old fashioned BPO 3000-type that date back to 1950 or earlier that require periodic adjustment, not the maintenance free relays that other administrations used with crossbar. Bad film editing or was the BPO a really old fashioned government department? The second, actually - In Australia our then old fashioned government department phone company APO started installing crossbar (with "modern" maintenance free relays) back in 1960 - which was years and years after the Americans. they showed ceramic formed wire wound resistors of a design introduced about 1900 too.

I'm confused was there not a mechanical exchange before this type. A massif room with banks of spinning carousels. I thought it went manual to mechanical to automatic.

Amazed they were fitting crossbar in 1970 ?

I mourn the loss of this once fantastic country

Would Mr. Lillicrap have crapped in his pants if after pulling out all the connections to the old exchange, the new exchange didn't work?

The operators at the Upminster Exchange must have been lactose intolerant, since they only needed five pints of milk delivered each day. ;)

That system would recover more quickly from a solar incident or an EM pulse. Digital is not as robust.

04.06: is that Jimmy Hill?

The commentary says "for forty years all calls including local ones had to be connected by an operator". Surely most/all exchanges would have been automated with Strowger in the 20s for local calls, with operators being used for trunk calls until STD. According to a Wikipedia article the UK started STD on 5 December 1958 but doesn't say when the roll-out was completed but 1970 when this film was made seems reasonable.

Why not a TXE4 instead?

That's some terrible delay between the video and audio

"laying cable 😂 is an expensive business" -

Tell me what sat o lights do ???? And what happens if you stand in 1 over time in the center of it

No one talked about the women being made redundant

back when people would call random numbers and do heavy breathing down the phone. they were great days,

People laugh, but I can definitely see someone from today-times wanting to call their kid Lillicrap. I mean, why not? But if you don't buy that I'm sure I can sell you on the law firm Weaver, Clark and Lillicrap.

New travel possible photos and EEG

Fantastic bygone era no DEI then but the influence of the nanny state was starting - totally unnecessary hard hats and safety glasses

It continues to boggle the mind how the Brits can be proud of so many things like being decades behind in their telecomminications network compared to the United States and many parts of Western Europe. Crying out loud, crowing about replacing a manual switch with a 1950s crossbar switch in greater London in bloody 1970??? For goodness sakes, U.S. cities were replacing crossbar switches with 1ESS switches by the mid-1960s and the only place you would see a manual exchange in 1970 U.S. was in a museum.

You know the London economy they say exists some were they don't know we're they just know exists well so do I

Scrapping lockdown me any one ask no did that BOLLOX

Think it's happening again no