Gibtelecom Decommissions System X Exchange After 32 years of Service to Gibraltar
Gibtelecom has decommissioned its System X fixed line telephone exchange after 32 years of service to Gibraltar.
Minister Sir Joe Bossano officially powered down the system Wednesday 13th April, having originally inaugurated the exchange back in 1990.
System X has a long history. Before its installation in 1990, all telephone services were operated by the Gibraltar Government Telephone Department and international circuits were provided by Cable & Wireless, present in Gibraltar since 1870 as the Falmouth, Gibraltar and Malta Telegraph Company.
Throughout the 1980s there was a shortage of local line capacity on the existing Crossbar exchange, which itself had replaced the relay and Strowger exchanges.
During the privatisation talks of the previous telephone department in the late 80s an agreement was reached between the Government of Gibraltar and British Telecom (BT) for the installation of a 14,000 line System X digital exchange.
This was commissioned and inaugurated on 31 March 1990 at the City Hall by the then Chief Minister, Sir Joe Bossano, who made the first call to the Managing Director of BT International, Mr Tony Booth. The digital exchange was installed on the top floor of the City Hall where the original 1926 Strowger Automatic Exchange was also homed. This made Gibraltar one of the first small countries in the world to move to a digital telephone service. Cable and Wireless, who provided international circuits installed a satellite earth station which made International Subscriber Dialling possible.
The capacity on the exchange was upgraded at various intervals throughout the years, ultimately reaching over 40,000 lines.
In July 2017 Gibtelecom entered into an agreement with Ericsson, Cisco and Nokia to replace System X with an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) platform. IMS is an exchange that can serve both fixed line and mobile services. It also provides customers with new and improved services and features, including fixed-mobile convergence, Hosted-PBX functionality, high-definition (HD) calling using Voice over LTE (VoLTE), instantaneous call setup times on mobile devices, and facilitated the introduction of 5G in 2021.
IMS has also added geographical redundancy throughout Gibtelecom’s voice networks, as the various IMS technology components are duplicated across various locations throughout Gibraltar.
As the IMS migration project is now complete, it has now fully replaced the System X exchange, which has served Gibraltar’s fixed line communications nicely for 32 years.
Gibtelecom’s Technology Director, Jansen Reyes, said “The System X exchange has served Gibraltar tremendously well over the past three decades. However, technology has evolved and moved on considerably. There is now a much greater set of features and services which can be provided with equipment taking up a much smaller footprint and a considerable reduction in power consumption,
whilst at the same time allowing for much quicker deployment times and greater flexibility. The migration to the new technology ecosystem, which has been conducted seamlessly and with virtually no interruption to customers, has been a major project with all technical teams involved. Incredibly some of our senior engineers who were originally involved in the commissioning of the previous exchange have been key members of the IMS commissioning, having continuously kept pace with evolving technologies throughout the years.”
Previous technology managers, engineers and Directors who had worked on System X throughout the years were present at a small ‘power down’ reception, as well as previous Ministers and Shadow Ministers of Telecommunications during the time the switch was active.
