I’ve recently managed to get hold of a whole bunch of Siemens Fastlnk component carriers (UMXLS, OMX2S2, OMX16S, SMXLS, …) together with a pile of spare components.
I’ve started to take some pictures of the idividual circuit boards and put them up at Siemens FastLink - Retronetworking - Open Source Mobile Communications
Example:
I’ll take some more pictures of the actual shelves and plan to add more as time permits.
Were those located in FTTC control cabinets?
The wiki only mentiones HDSL.
Although, the cabinet is located in a residential area in East Germany.
Did they use HDSL there or did FastLink also provide ADSL?
According to Google StreetView it was still there as of March 2022, although I don’t know if it is still being used (I doubt the old ISDN stuff is still in use). Maybe they replaced the components in the inside.
I don’t have insight into operational questions like this. But yes, the equipment was designed for such use cases, among others. FastLink can be used as ONU.
HDSL (2-pair) and SHDSL (1-pair) in the context of the FastLink as I documented in the wik is used for back-haul transport of 2Mbit/s leased circuits and ISDN PRI service. Those services were available nationwide in Germany, and are unrelated to the (much later) DSL services for consumer internet access (ADSL, ADSL2+, VDSL, VDSL2, …)
As a subscriber you had no influence on the transport medium used for your 2Mbps leased circuit or ISDN PRI. You just ordered it and Telekom decided using which transmission medium to serve you. The customer interface is the E1 (G.703/G.704) circuit coming out of the NT. Anything “upwards” from the NT is an implementation detail of the telecom opeorator.
