The AXE telephone exchange is a product line of

circuit switched Circuit switching is a method of implementing a telecommunications network in which two network nodes establish a dedicated communications channel ( circuit) through the network before the nodes may communicate. The circuit guarantees the full b ...

digital

telephone exchange A telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital syst ...

s manufactured by

Ericsson (lit. "Telephone Stock Company of LM Ericsson"), commonly known as Ericsson, is a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. The company sells infrastructure, software, and services in informat ...

, a Swedish telecom company. It was developed in 1974 by Ellemtel, a

research and development Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in Europe as research and technological development (RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existi ...

subsidiary of Ericsson and Televerket. The first system was deployed in 1976. AXE is not an

acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...

, but an Ericsson product code. The AXE is the digital successor to the AKE analogue telephone exchange and ARF/ARM family of

crossbar switch In electronics and telecommunications, a crossbar switch (cross-point switch, matrix switch) is a collection of switches arranged in a matrix configuration. A crossbar switch has multiple input and output lines that form a crossed pattern of int ...

es. The design is modular with an APZ dual processor running in sync mode, an APT switching part and an APG I/O part. It is used for connecting local

landline A landline (land line, land-line, main line, home phone, fixed-line, and wireline) is a telephone connection that uses metal wires or optical fiber telephone line for transmission, as distinguished from a mobile cellular network, which uses ...

s, operating mobile networks ( TDMA,

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a standard developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to describe the protocols for second-generation ( 2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile devices such ...

CDMA Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method used by various radio communication technologies. CDMA is an example of multiple access, where several transmitters can send information simultaneously over a single communication ...

W-CDMA The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a third generation mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM standard. Developed and maintained by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), UMTS is a component of the Inte ...

, PDC), international telephony traffic and signaling. AXE based equipment are being used as BSC/TRC, MSC, HLR, SCP, FNR, TSC, STP and wireline nodes. The brain of the AXE system is a dual processor system called APZ. It runs in parallel sync mode making it fault redundant. The family of APZs started with APZ 210 03 in 1976; the latest one is APZ 214 03. The parallel sync mode was partly abandoned in the APZ 212 40 and subsequent models and has been replaced with a warm standby scheme. The latest APZ type is 214 03 which is used as MSC, TSC and HLR Blade in AXE. The latest implementation of AXE is on a blade cluster system capable of handling up to 8 million subscribers. The core of the switching part was the Group Switch, initially a time-space-time multiplexer capable of switching up to 64K positions or connections. This Group Switch later evolved to a Distributed Group Switch using Time-Space switching technique with a maximum capacity of 512K. AXE nodes have evolved as a traffic controller, having the new Media Gateway node running on CPP platform handle the payload traffic. Ericsson AXE telephone exchanges support lawful intercepts via the remote-control equipment subsystem (RES), which carries out the tap, and the interception management system (IMS), software used for initiating the tap, which adds the tap to the RES database. In a fully operating lawful interception system the RES and IMS both create logs of all numbers being tapped so that system administrators can perform audits to find unauthorized taps. Code is written in PLEX (a

proprietary programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming la ...

tied to the AXE hardware, designed by Göran Hemdahl), SDL and ASA210C programming languages. Code for Regional Processors (controlling hardware Extension Modules) is written in ASA210R. AXE switches used in the United Kingdom are sometimes referred to as

System Y System Y is the terminology used by BT, the main operator of the telephone network in the United Kingdom, to refer to the Ericsson AXE digital switching system. In the mid-1980s, British Telecom chose the well established AXE10 digital switch to ...

as they were the first competitive alternative to the domestically developed System X digital switching system.

References

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External links

Ericsson AXE web page
Telephone exchange equipment Ericsson

See also

References

External links