Telephone companies have local “offices”, which in the old days had a human switchboard operator, that have the automatic switch gear for you local telephone system. My guess each office will have to have one of these boxes.
That makes sense.
BTW: my town is so small and rural that the local CO is a landmark LOL!
They are generally those boxes at the end of a street or local community.
I once worked in a building that handled all overseas calls to Europe. What had been 150,000 sq feet of “operators” was by that time run from a computer rack the size of a small refrigerator.
Everything in telecom is getting smaller and faster. And run almost entirely without people.