From: "Victor L. Boersma" <[email protected]> Subject: Ringer Equivalent
You should get an education with Chuck Berestecky of Lucent, who almost invented the "ringer equivalence", which has nothing to do with maximum capacitance. In the "olden days" when telephones were black, as God intended them to b= e, they also has electro-mechanical ringers. I believe they were coded "C-4= " ringers by the people who are now Lucent (even I am not old enough to be sure). The other part of that organization, now no longer Lucent, sometimes know= n as AT&T, determined that over a maximum length loop, they were prepared to supply enough juice to ring 5 ringers in parallel. Hence a ringer equivalence number of 5 means that the device draws as much ringing curre= nt as 5 C-4 Ringers. Obviously, if the CO ringing generator supplies other than the standard frequency ringing current, things change. This has been a misnomer from the start and the Canadian standard refused= to make that mistake and called it a "Load Number". A load number of 100 (100% loading on the line) represented the equivalent of 5 C-4 Ringers. The telephone system was never designed, it evolved. It always was able = to take a bit of abuse, but things became = objectionable when people tried to abuse it all the time. Ciao, Vic
