wales@cs.ucla.edu (08/04/89)
What is the "best" choice these days for multi-line phone wiring in a home? For best isolation between lines (especially if, say, one or more lines were being used for data), I would assume twisted-pair cable (anywhere from 2 to 25 pairs) would be ideal. But is it actually used? If not, is this because it's just too expensive? Or do the (possibly outdated) electrical codes in various places prohibit it? If some kind of twisted-pair cable is OK for residential phone wiring, how difficult/expensive would it typically be to retrofit such stuff into an existing house? At the moment, I'm thinking very hypothetically (not owning my own home yet). I'm thinking into the future, though, and want to have some idea of what kinds of obstacles (physical, phone-company, electrical-code) I would be up against. Responses from anywhere in the US or Canada welcomed and encouraged. -- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 (213) 825-5683 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 // USA wales@CS.UCLA.EDU ...!(uunet,ucbvax,rutgers)!cs.ucla.edu!wales "K-9, I think we're going to find out what it's like to be a cricket ball."
ron@hardees.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie) (08/06/89)
Actually, 25 pair wiring to each room is going out of fashion in the commercial setting now. The new electronic key sets such as MERLIN require only 3 pairs. ISDN (and ISDN like) stuff get by with less. Running 4 pairs seems to be popular suggestion with the local phone company around here. I've got 25 pair cable in my house. It wasn't that expensive. I put it in myself. Sometime when we moved, the phone company managed to start billing something like $.30 a month. Generally this is a ripoff, but it was amusing when we had to have the phone dude out to figure out why all our lines died. He wasn't used to finding a back board full of 66-blocks in residential garages. Turned out that the cats had managed to piss in one of them. The guy left me some extra goodies when I offered to repunch down that cable rather than making him do it. Pretty good deal for .30/mo. -Ron