"Robert M. Hamer" <HAMER524@ruby.vcu.edu> (05/29/91)
Last Thursday my wife and I closed on a townhouse in Princeton, NJ. We moved in last Friday, although I'm back here in humid Virginia until the end of June. I inspected the phone connections and discovered the following: I can't find a network interface. Coming in from outside into the basement is a line with what looks like perhaps 10 or 15 twisted pairs. One of the pairs is connected to one of the old-fashioned terminals (with four screw-type poles) to which all of our in-house wiring is connected. (The inhouse wiring is a combination of what looks like standard quad phone wire and what looks like three-pair or four-pair twisted pair. Only one pair is in use. Red/green on the quad for tap/ring. Go figure.) I have an uncomfortable suspician that all these pairs coming into the basement go to other people's phone lines, and that in their basements, my pair is included among those terminated in their basements. I have heard of such arrangements for apartments, but would they have done it for townhouses? (There are about eight units in our building.) If that is indeed true, is there any way I might persuade the local telco to make some other arrangement so that my pairs aren't available for others to tap into; to make phone calls on, etc?
Kral <braun@dri.com> (06/01/91)
In article <telecom11.408.3@eecs.nwu.edu> HAMER524@ruby.vcu.edu (Robert M. Hamer) writes: > I can't find a network interface. Coming in from outside into the > basement is a line with what looks like perhaps 10 or 15 twisted > pairs. One of the pairs is connected to one of the old-fashioned > terminals (with four screw-type poles) to which all of our in-house > wiring is connected. I can't tell from your description if this is related or not, so take it for what it is worth... In the East Bay (ie Oakland and points east) area I've seen residential units where they string 12 twisted pair wires (not cables, wires, no sheathing!) throughout the house when it is built. Then you just tap on to the pair you want to consider active at each outlet. This lets you fix broken circuits, or have different circuits active at different outlets. This was in a house that was a rental, primarily to students. So it was not unusual to have four lines or more in the house, with each bedroom being on a different line. This setup made it pretty easy to do. kral * 408/647-6112 * ...!uunet!drivax!braun * braun@dri.com