John_Richard_Bruni@cup.portal.com (02/25/91)
Pat and all, The title of this thread reminds me of something funny (as in 'odd'). I called Pac Bell recently to have the line installed which I am using at this very moment to communicate with Internet. They had trouble finding the demarc. The gal who came to hook it up asked if she could book the next day to do the job since time was running short. She was real nice so what the heck I said OK. The next morning she located the demarc in the crawl space access port located in my bedroom closet. I`m in a townhouse and there are five more units attached to my place. Amazingly enough, *ALL* the demarcs for the building are in MY bedroom. There is a 25 pair cable built out in the crawlspace ... actually it`s just a cable with 25 pairs. Each one has a `peanut' attached to it which the Pac Bell gal tells me is a terminator. If I were my neighbors I`d be real glad it`s me who owns this unit. I am strongly opposed to wiretaps of any kind so they`re safe with me. But what a mickey-mouse installation! I really want it out of here. Rocky (The Flying Squirrel) ROCKY@CUP.PORTAL.COM
john@uunet.uu.net (John Temples) (02/26/91)
In article <telecom11.157.1@eecs.nwu.edu> John_Richard_Bruni@ cup.portal.com writes: > But what a mickey-mouse installation! I really want it out of here. What if one of the neighbors wanted to add another line? Would it have to be done at YOUR convenience since the telco would need access to your bedroom? What if you were out of town for a couple of weeks -- or for the winter? John W. Temples -- john@jwt.UUCP (uunet!jwt!john) [Moderator's Note: Unfortunatly, they (telco) could demand a key from the landlord and enter the premises to work. Telco always has what is known as 'easement rights' where their wires are placed. We had a story in the Digest more than a year ago about a situation almost like this one: A man who was visually hanicapped had run an answering service from his home for many years. He apparently had about a hundred subscriber lines terminating on a switchboard in a room in his house. The service closed down, he moved and sold the house. The woman who bought it did not realize that in the room which would become her bedroom there was a *large* terminal box in the closet. Since it was an older urban neighborhood in a suburb here, as to be expected the hundred or so pairs terminating in that terminal box were multipled all over over the neighborhood. She had phone pairs for everyone in a two or three block area in the box in her bedroom. Telco said they would move the box elsewhere if she paid them a couple thousand dollars to do so; she demanded rent from telco and they told her to jump in the lake. The last I heard, she was suing the guy who sold her the house, to get him to pay the telco for the move, and telco was pressuring her to provide them with a key to get into the area as required. PAT]
cml@cs.umd.edu (Christopher Lott) (02/27/91)
In article <telecom11.158.12@eecs.nwu.edu> you write: >hundred or so pairs terminating in that terminal box were multiplied >all over over the neighborhood. ^^^^^^^^^ Pardon my stupidity, Pat, but would you please explain what this means? I can't find much mention of lines being multiplied in the glossary. Thanks, Christopher Lott \/ Dept of Comp Sci, Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 cml@cs.umd.edu /\ 4122 AV Williams Bldg 301.405.2721 <standard disclaimers> [Moderator's Note: Unfortunatly a case of the PD's crept in there. Printer's Deviltries, (or PD's for short -- another name for typographical errors) creep in when you print a large quantity of stuff every day. The correct word was 'multipled' -- not 'multiplied'. A telephone cable contains a large number of pairs of wires. At each place along the way where a phone is (might be) installed, some of the individual pairs are 'opened', or made available for connections. For maximum flexibility, each pair in the cable might be opened a dozen times along the cable run. Naturally, only one subscriber will use the pair at any given time. When we say a pair is 'multipled', we mean it is availale for being picked up (or used, or connected to a phone) at several places between the central office and the other end of the cable a few miles away. Picture a switchboard with a dozen trunk lines to the central office and maybe a hundred extensions. The extensions share the trunk lines, being swapped on and off the line as required. The same thin happens with cables. A pair terminates at my house and the same pair terminates at your house a block away. I move out and no longer need the pair, but you install a second line and need another pair. In other words, the pairs within the cable go parallel to several locations at once. When the phone installer climbs the pole at your house to bring you a second line, he is supposed to then go down the street to where I used to live, climb the pole and *disonnect* (or open up) the same pair at that end, preventing someone down the street from getting on your line. They sometimes forget to do that. Once in an apartment I had, there was a modular phone jack. I had only one line, but there were two pairs in the modular jack. I was curious, and went on the other pair: Viola! dial tone ... I dialed the ring back code to see what would happen, and let it ring. Presently it was answered by a lady. When I questioned where she was at, it turned out she was across the alley and a few houses down. A phone man had not done his job correctly. A long example, but that is what we mean by 'mulitples on the cable': The opening up, or ability to connect to the same wires at many locations, depending on who got them first and who needs themm when the subscriber on them quits the service. PAT]
kgdykes@watmath.waterloo.edu (Ken Dykes) (02/27/91)
In article <telecom11.157.1@eecs> John_Richard_Bruni@cup.portal.com writes: X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 157, Message 1 of 10 > the demarc in the crawl space access port located in my bedroom > closet. I`m in a townhouse and there are five more units attached to my > place. Amazingly enough, *ALL* the demarcs for the building are in MY > bedroom. There is a 25 pair cable built out in the crawlspace ... In my highrise apartment bldg (and I suspect this could be common wiring practice for highrise buildings) I live in unit #1004. Behind one of the RJ-14 plates on a common supporting wall is a 25-pair cable drop. Bascially all the "-04" units can tap each other. And it would be true for any vertical-row of units. Simply dropping cables down walls like that I suspect is the, er, "efficient" way of doing the job... Then of course out on the lawn beside my building is the Bell green-box (about four or five feet wide, three or so feet tall, ten or so inches thick, on a cement pad) with the millions of connections for the three highrises , one lowrise, and one strip-mall (with bank :-) in the immediate vicinity. The padlock on it is a joke. Ken Dykes, Thinkage Ltd., Waterloo, Ontario, Canada [43.47N 80.52W] kgdykes@watmath.waterloo.edu [129.97.128.1] watmath!kgdykes [Moderator's Note: This is another example of how a cable run with many pairs is multipled. There is some absolute number of pairs available from the phone exchange to the apartment complex. The cable terminates in the outside box mentioned, and from there the wires can be swapped back and forth. PAT]
ROCKY@cup.portal.com (03/03/91)
John Temples <jwt!john@uunet.uu.net> responded to a posting of mine that mentioned the fact that there is a demarc in my bedroom crawlspace with 25 lines, including the lines for the other units in my townhouse. He wondered what would happen if someone else wanted service on their line while I was out of town or otherwise unavailable to let Telco in to do the work. I wonder about it too. I sure didn`t know about this when I bought the place. Fortunately for me, no one seems to be adding to their phone lines around here as I have not been bothered (knock on wood :-) ) in the two years that I have lived here.
john@uunet.uu.net (John A. Weeks III) (03/03/91)
In <telecom11.157.1@eecs.nwu.edu> John_Richard_Bruni@cup.portal.com writes: > Amazingly enough, *ALL* the demarcs for the building are in MY bedroom. Do you like making free long distance phone calls? Or how about making crank calls to 911? Being a total paranoid, I could never tolerate having my phone wires available to someone else. Do your neighbors know about this? John A. Weeks III (612) 942-6969 john@newave.mn.org NeWave Communications ...uunet!rosevax!tcnet!wd0gol!newave!john [Moderator's Note: You had better start tolerating having your phone wires available to everyone else ... if most people knew how phone pairs are multipled a bunch of places along the cable run, they would revolt. All you have in his case is *easier* access to the pairs in a relatively private setting. But believe me you, between you and the CO your pair shows up in a few basements along the way or on a few poles. In the building where I used to live, the big inside terminal block had oh, maybe three hundred pairs. The building used less than a hundred of them. The apartment building across the street also had a box where all of ours came up, etc. What happened was both apartment buildings used to have switchboard service for the tenants years before. Each switchboard had maybe a dozen trunks. When the owners of the building got tired of having to hire desk clerks to run the boards, they had the board pulled out. Telco had to somehow find pairs in the cable for each apartment (to have its own phone line). The results were sometimes pretty weird. My case was not unique. In all older urban areas with (older) high rise apartment buildings the buildings used to have cord/plug type switchboard service. Maybe five percent of the switchboards are still around; the rest are gone with the apartments wired straight through to the CO, multipled to beat the band up and down the street with every other apartment high-rise in parallel on the cable run. See my article in the Archives 'find.pair' for more details. PAT]