A central office, also known as a telephone exchange or simply an exchange, is a building used by telecommunications companies to house equipment for the provision of voice services to their customers. The layout and construction of central offices varies significantly from country to country.
In most cases, the central office is where all the phone lines in an area come together and connect with each other as well as with long-distance lines. The calls are then routed through the switching equipment in the office to their correct destination. Central offices typically also house network control functions such as monitoring circuit performance and managing traffic on the network.
The first step in providing service to a customer is connecting them to a local distribution frame at their premises which links them up with a pair of wires that comes into the building from underground ducts or aerial cables strung between poles. From there, each customer’s line connects directly or indirectly via cross-connections (known colloquially in North America as “jumper blocks”) to one particular incoming trunk line at its termination panel in the Main Distribution Frame (MDF) room within that same central office.
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