A 5ESS is a telephony switch, originally made by AT&T, now made by Alcatel/Lucent. It’s pretty much a standard telecom switch, along with the Nortel DMS and Ericsson AXE 10. (And others.)
Good Advice (although you’d have to pay me a lot more than that to get me to move to Saudi Arabia for 2 years!).
I make more than $25/hr as a switch tech here in Austin. It’s been pretty good here since moving from California; I’m doing better even though I don’t make quite as much.
The Union LEC techs here in Anchorage pull down 100K/yr + another (about) 25K/yr in bennies. Not bad at all for a HS diploma.
And if you join the USAF, they will send you to a DMS 10 school and let yu work on the gear for 4 years - for a lot less dough.
This came up in a bull session some time back when I worked for a CLEC - how could a person make a good living without a sheepskin - the the related costs.
The work in Saudi was to recoup your out of pocket training costs and pick up a good nest egg for return to the US.
A lot of Cell carriers use a variant of the 5ESS - CDX or a VCDX.