Meantime Thorn Ericsson Ltd is celebrating the handing over to British Telecommunications Plc of the 500,000th subscriber line of AXE digital exchange installed in the UK network: over 125 AXE exchanges are now in service here, and are going in at a rate approaching 1m lines a year. And another cause for celebration at Thorn-Ericsson’s Scunthorpe factory is installation at the first of five pilot sites of a new modular version of the AXE exchange that comes in compact 256-line cabinets and can be squeezed into sites too small for other exchanges: the compact modules come pre-tested and the first complex, with a total of 640 lines, has gone into Walsgrave-on-Sowe, Coventry. Despite the lingering name, Thorn-Ericsson is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Swedish firm.
L M Ericsson Telefon AB is doing enormous business in Mexico these days, and the latest contract, worth $230m to its Teleindustria Ericsson SA local subsidiary, is for digital and analogue switching systems and transmission, power and cooling equipment for the 1990 leg of the local phone company Telefonos de Mexico’s expansion programme. And if that weren’t enough, the company yesterday announced a co-operation agreement with Peking Wire Communications Plant for the manufacture of the MD110 digital switching system in China, in the meantime supplying 55,000 MD110 extensions. The two contracts are together worth $40m; the manufacturing pact is for 100,000 lines of MD110 switches over six years.