Open Infrastructure Map is a view of the world's infrastructure mapped in the OpenStreetMap database. This data isn't exposed on the default OSM map, so I built Open Infrastructure Map to visualise it. If you want to edit the data and you're new to OpenStreetMap, check out learnOSM.
If you already have some OSM experience and want to start tagging infrastructure things, take a look at the tagging guidelines for power and telecoms.

The Telephone Central Office Building Pictures website was created for one reason only - historical preservation.

The telephone central office is the location where local landline telephone switching takes place. Inside is a specialized electronic telephone "switch" where phone calls are transferred from one customer to another, or to another central office via a long distance circuit.

The central office is almost as old as the telephone itself. Often times these buildings were built many years ago with an architecture that has been long ago forgotten. Many times these buildings were very large to accommodate the analog switching equipment of the day - Step by Step, Crossbar, Panel or early electronic. These days almost all central offices have modernized their switching equipment to a fully electronic system that takes up only a tiny space where years ago large electro-mechanical systems took up floors of space.

As telephony has changed over time, many people are now abandoning the traditional landline telephone for cellular or various Voice over IP methods. The theory is that as traditional landline use goes down, these buildings of yesteryear may disappear.

The goal of this website is to preserve these buildings for future generations in the years ahead. About 50 years ago, a telephone preservationist called "Mark Bernay" started recording telephone sounds. He now has a website called Phone Trips. Also on that website are sounds from his friend "Evan Doorbell" from 45 years ago. All the switching equipment that made these sounds are long gone. With the help of these two folks and others like them, we are able to listen to these sounds today. This site has as similar goal - preserving what we have now for people to look at in the future.

Public copy of the telecom-archives mailing list.

Telecom Digest was started in August, 1981 by Jon Solomon as a mailing list on the old ARPA network. It was an offshoot of the Human Nets forum intended for discussion of telephones and related communications topics.

Pat Townson moderated the Digest from 1996 until he suffered a stroke in 2007, and Bill Horne has been the Moderator/Editor/facilitator of the Digest since then. The moderator works through accounts provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA.

Telecom Digest is not strictly speaking part of Usenet. It is an official Internet mailing list publication. A decision was made at some point in the past to 'port' the Digest to the Usenet news group 'comp.dcom.telecom', in order that Usenet readers would be able to participate in the Digest. I became Moderator of comp.dcom.telecom in 2007 in addition to being Moderator of Telecom Digest. For all practical purposes, the messages in comp.dcom.telecom are identical to the messages which appear simultaneously in The Telecom Digest, although readers of The Telecom Digest have the option or receiving an actual digest, i.e., they can sign up to receive all of the posts for a single day combined in a single email.

The Telecom Digest is the oldest continuously published mailing list on the Internet.

At Futel, we believe in the preservation of public telephone hardware as a means of providing access to the agora for everybody, and toward that goal we are privileged to provide free telephone calls, voicemail, and telephone-mediated services. We do not judge the motivations of our users, or who they choose to call; if they don’t have someone to call, we can provide a presence on the other end. Denial of telephony services has long been a tactic used against undesirable populations, and our devices will counteract that. But more importantly, we will help to establish a new era of communication, one in which reaching out is not only desirable, but mandatory.

Based in Portland, OR.

Github repos here: https://github.com/kra

RS232 interface on one end, wifi transceiver on the other pretending to be a Hayes-compatible modem. Has an OLED panel on it so you can see what it's doing.

Homepage of the PLA. Fun stuff, here!

An archive of recorded messages and error tones from United States telephony networks. Available for online listening or free download.

A software modem that pretends to be an analog dialup modem from the old days, only for communications it uses the IAX protocol to connect to an Asterisk VoIP switch rather than the PSTN.

A drill-downable Google map that lists hundreds of data centers around the world.