Telephone Exchanges

Brief description

The National Telephone Exchanges Dataset presents the spatial locations of Australia's known Telephone Exchanges.
The purpose of the National Telephone Exchanges Dataset is to support decision makers from and all levels of National, State and Local Government, Industry and other interested parties to make better, and more informed decisions based on evidence based information to underpin future emergency management planning and communications management decisions.

Lineage

The telephone exchanges dataset was digitized in 2012 from orthophotos and satellite imagery held within Geoscience Australia. Image resolution ranged from 0.15m to 2.5m.

Source Information
The primary information source used to locate and attribute the telephone exchanges was the ADSL2 Exchanges website (www.adsl2exchanges.com.au). The exchange name, address, latitude and longitude were obtained from the website after receiving written permission to use the ADSL2 Exchanges data. The generated table was converted to a point feature class based on the latitude and longitude fields. The Exchange Service Area (ESA) codes were generated from the spreadsheet Telstra_access-broadband-adsl-en-ex.xls, available from the Telstra Wholesale website (http://telstrawholesale.com.au/download/document/access-broadband-adsl-en-ex.xls), then checked for accuracy by GA. The point locations were validated against imagery and other publicly available information. Where required, the point locations were moved to the correct location (centre of the exchange building roofline) and attribution was adjusted. Polygons of the building rooflines were digitized to create a Telephone Exchanges Polygon dataset.

Primary information sources were supplemented with online, publicly available information used to confirm location and attribute the features, such as the Whirlpool Australian Exchange Guide v3.0 (http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/Australian_Exchange_Guide).