Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!chinacat!telecom-gateway From: owens%tartarus@gargoyle.uchicago.edu (Christopher Owens) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Two Lines From a Twisted Three? Message-ID: Date: 29 Nov 89 18:21:40 GMT Sender: news@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG Lines: 31 Approved: telecom-request@chinacat.lonestar.org X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 542, message 7 of 7 I want to bring a second phone line into my apartment, which is in a 1920's highrise in Chicago. There is no problem getting the second pair to the terminal block across the hall from my apartment, but there the fun starts. Running from the terminal block to my apartment is an old-style twisted-3 -- apparently once upon a time subscriber lines required three conductors: tip, ring, and a third line that played some role in kicking the switch gear into action. (Was sleeve extended all the way to customer premises?) From the junction box to my apartment is only a run of about 25 feet, but the twisted three shares a conduit with two other twisted threes serving two other apartments. The installer said the cable was stiff and brittle, and that there was no way to pull new cable without pulling new cable for all three apartments at once. This is estimated to be about $300 in labor. I don't feel like paying to upgrade service to apartments I don't inhabit, and the building doesn't want to pay either. Anybody have a suggestion? One thought was to use the extra wire of my three with an extra wire taken from somewhere, but there really is nowhere. I can't get to any of the other wires from my apartment. I've been told there is a way to use some kind of bridge circuit at each end of a 3-conductor wire to enable two phone lines to be run over the wire. Does anyone know about this. If they exist, where can one get them? This didn't sound like any kind of fancy multiplexing, just a bridged circuit of some kind. Would it leave me with a clean line and full bandwidth? How would it interact with a high-speed modem on one of the lines? Thank you.