Frank, I think you were a bit too flippant with NEBS question, to the point that you missed highlighting the reason any new carrier would care about NEBS.
< NEBS compliance is often required by telecommunications service
providers such as RBOCs and Interexchange Carriers for equipment
installed in their switching facilities. > If we dropped the "often", that is an accurate statement. Your next comment was the problem:
< It's a kind of assurance standard that says if you meet it, you can drop something from twelve feet off the ground and sprinkle it with water in an oven rated at 500 degrees C, and it will still work. And then some.> That is the Level 2 and Level 3 NEBS standards you allude to here (generally -- these parts deal with reliability), and no new carrier really cares about that anymore via NEBS. Since the FCC ruled that the ILECs can only hold CLECs to NEBS Level 1 testing and certification, don't expect the NEBS labs in the US to do much extra business anymore with CLEC gear in the NEBS 2/3 test suites.
Level 1 basically involves a suite of tests that provide broad assurance that a piece of telecom equipment, whether functioning properly or malfunctioning in certain predictable ways, will not cause a smoke, heat, fire, or RF emission problem to the other equipment in the same building space. There are limits on the heat load per rack, tests of susceptibility to fire, tests of RF emission levels with the cabinet doors open and closed, etc. As far as NEBS in the news, the FCC decision last month basically said that the ILECs may no longer make it a condition for collocation that CLEC equipment meet any standards of performance or reliability -- the ILECs can only require certification that it won't start a fire or emit a lot of radiation that could muck up other equipment performance.
Frank, I know you know all of this, but the issue and the currency of NEBS in the news seemed to make question worthy of a fuller answer. |
