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From a compact cd rom drive from a laptop I believe. Heard that sometimes they clear telco. Anyone? And by anyone I imagine it will be lostinlodos who responds haha. Thanks in advance.

if you don't label them as mini cd-boards, you will probably get peripheral... make sure to label them as such so they take a close look at it and give you the correct grade. And no, that wont go as telecom.

It is telecom based on my own experience since you have enough ic chips on the board for telecom. The ic chips don't necessarily need to be on one side of the board. You could have half and half. This is one of the many exceptions.

yeah, the more I think about it, you might get telecom... good chip count to board size and no heavy capacitors or transformers... i think you might be right 602bidgeway.

Is there a rule of thumb when determining whether or not it's populated enough for telco? How did u make that determination that there are enough chips? Looks like if you took all the chips and put them on the same side it would cover most of it. Is this sort of how you were looking at it? Just trying to get a feel for it so I won't need to keep posting.

That one is borderline. I've had Half-size boards go both ways. I lean towards cd/dvd though on this one. Don't think it's quite there but that said I'd sens it in its own bag in your shipment box and let them determine if it makes telco.

honestly, what makes the determination is the guy who does the sorting at the dock. :p Just depends what he thinks. There is no hard and fast rule, but the more chips, the better your odds. they are looking for high chip count, high SMDs (surface mounted devices), with little to no miscellaneous metallic weight (like copper transformers, large aluminum capacitors). Those are the best guidelines I can give you.

Exactly. Telco isn't so much a class for boardsort as it is a catch grade for stuff that's better than base classes but doesn't make another class on it's own.
In this case drive controllers not up to the hdd grade. But better than cd/dvd.
Video game and computer cartridges... dont quite make gold or silver ram (too much board) so they go telco.
Older computer and telephonic boards with rom banks... no gold caps so they go telco.
It's a "grade" that no one is quite sure on, even boardsort.
From my understanding it's also their toughest class to move down the line.
Other recyclers call this class high grade, mid-grade high, and pcb#1 variably among others.

Rule of thumb? If you had 100 lbs of "telco" boards and completely dissected and cleared every board bare... and sold each individual component class to the refiner separately they would (in bulk) have a higher vale for the components than the populated telco boards.

Then again that's true for most classes of pcbs.