Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!casbah.acns.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: newave!john@uunet.uu.net (John A. Weeks III) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: In a Corner of our Bedroom Message-ID: Date: 3 Mar 91 03:57:33 GMT Sender: news@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Mr. News) Reply-To: "John A. Weeks III" Organization: NeWave Communications Ltd, Eden Prairie, MN Lines: 40 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 170, Message 10 of 13 Originator: telecom@delta.eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: hub.eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu In 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]