CASE STUDY:

SOR18 Rural Telephony System

Project Description

The SOR18 Rural Telephony System was designed in the 70's to provide normal telephone services to users who are traditionally serviced over the old open wire (party line) routes on farms and other rural areas. The SOR18 system enabled Telkom to provide 18 telephone lines over a single open wire route covering distances exceeding 350km.

Solving Obsolescence Problems

Keystone Electronic Solutions was first tasked with solving urgent obsolescence problems in the entire SOR18 product family. Keystone Electronics Solutions provided the customer with resolutions that has prolonged the life of this product well into the next decade.

Internet-based Alarm Management System

Secondly, Keystone Electronic Solutions was tasked with the development of an Internet based alarm management system for SOR18 without impacting on the existing operation of the SOR18 system.

Plug-in Controller

Keystone Electronic Solutions then proceeded to upgrade all the legacy software in order for the SOR18 system to reliably operate in its built-in managed mode. Keystone Electronic Solutions then developed a plug-in controller card for the SOR18 exchange rack which aggregated all the alarms for a SOR18 rack and its subscriber units and then made it accessible through an onboard embedded web server.

Achieving the Unthinkable

In so doing we have achieved the unthinkable .... we have enabled hardware that was developed long before the Internet to be managed over the Internet.