We had a call from one of our mining customers to say that “half my extensions don’t work”. They had moved one of the extensions to another outlet and it no longer worked. They had attempted some troubleshooting and brought the phone down to the patch panel. None of the extensions on that panel (half the extensions on the phone system), connected to an expansion module, worked.
They have a Nortel BCM50 we installed some years ago. It’s one of a handful of BCM’s that we still have. At some stage they will be moving to Microsoft Teams…
I visited site to see what was going on. Firstly, I noticed that the lights on the DSM16+ card were out but the expansion chassis fan was at high speed so I felt that perhaps the module had failed. The system is quite dusty and at some point, the dust on the circuit board will become conductive and short out things. A replacement module showed rapidly blinking lights but normal fan speed. Perhaps the chassis itself was faulty? They had some spare parts from another site that was decommissioned a few years ago including a chassis with DSM16+ module so I substituted that and after a reboot I had the same issue – rapidly blinking lights.
Running out of options I wondered if the power supply was suspect. The BCM50 uses a 19 Volt laptop power supply with a standard barrel socket. I tried using my Asus laptop power pack and it fitted perfectly, the module came into service and appeared to be working correctly.
I couldn’t leave it there so another substitute had to be found. The company has a lot of old equipment still on site so after some scratching round in boxes with their on-site IT man we found a selection of Toshiba laptop power packs. One of those fitted perfectly and brought the module back into service.
The BCM50’s are remarkably reliable. Their Achilles heel is the spinning hard drive and cut down SATA controller which makes substitution with an SSD or even a modern hard drive problematic. I’ve experienced the occasional module failure and expansion chassis failure but never a power supply.
ICS Technologies is located near Brisbane, Australia. We still have some spare parts for the older BCM’s that are still serving customers needs. Contact us.
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