Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Wed, 29 May 91 08:44 EDT From: "Robert M. Hamer" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Incoming Lines From Telco Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 408, Message 3 of 7 Lines: 29 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?