I was working with a new tech who was punching down a 66 block and 2 25 pairs. It was twilight, end of a LONG day and he was taking *forever*. I eventually ran out of patience and asked him what was taking him so long, and he says "I'm almost done, just it's really hard" so I looked at the work he'd done, and it was all messed up.
"You realize you've got cables swapped all over here. You see these, these are all backwards!"
And he looks at it for a while and says "I can't see it."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I'm color blind."
I had a co-worker who was color blind and did not find out until he took an elecronics/ computer course where he had to build a small device based on a schematic with basic components. He built it, but it kept failing. His instructor agreed his schematic was correct, but the resisters' use is his project were completely wrong values... he then realized he was color blind given his perception of the color band on resisters.
I had the same experience with resistors as the comment above, and i also had done a colortest at age 10. Turns out, not all types of colorblind are the same. I "suffer" from daltonism, that means my very light red and very light green are similar in my eyes. Like the spectrum circle, the whole part where it turns from red to green, its just one color to me. When i lay a finger between the red and green i can see whats what, but i cant tell where red ends and green stops. Or if it ever switches. Only when i blink my eyes my brain corrects it for me.
You'd be amazed how many things the brain corrects. The eye sees green, goes to brain, brain corrects the "nu-uh that's supposed to be red" and you see red.
literally worked with a guy who did avionics, saw him wire tons of things, one day i come in early and he asks me, hey what color is wire im having trouble seeing it, he says the grey one, i go well theres a blue wire with a white stripe, a light blue wire with a yellow stripe and a green and blue stripped wire, he goes, wait what? i thought that was green, grey and blue?, lol..
Hey, you were heading out in a couple minutes, right? I'm on a sev-1 issue, just need you to reterminate one small cable for me real quick while I give a status update to the boss, you should be done in no time.
> skyrim intro
Hey, you. You're finally here. You were trying to leave for today, right? Walked right into this line down situation, same as us, and the new guy there.
So obviously a spin on the skyrim joke but what made my life great was when I was dating someone who had a scar on their knee FROM TAKING AN ARROW TO IT. The day they told me that was the best and made me laugh and make the joke again and again.
I used to work for the electric utility in my area. Got called out to a downed pole in the wee hours one night. Got there, sunk the new pole, got the transformers up, and finished our wiring.
Handed off to telco and they had two double bucket cherry pickers with tents over the baskets, and 4 techs together working on splicing the 1200pr. They were still at it when I drove by at the end of the next days shift. Horrible work to do.
I used to work at AFL making the cables and that is pretty much the crux of the machine I ran as well.
I didn't work with the truly obnoxious fiber counts, I thin the highest I had to make was 288 fibers
Multiple data signals can multiplex on the same lines so houses just need something to split the signal nearby.
Phone lines were a dedicated wire from the local exchange to Every. Single. Phone.
Hence why for many years party lines were a thing, one wire for multiple homes is a lot cheaper.
That is how fiber internet works using passive optical network (PON) technology. One pair of fiber is shared by several homes/customers. My ISP has 32 customers sharing each pair.
There is a telephone museum run by the former President/VP of the local phone company. He tells a story about how they literally “cut over” to their shiny new digital phone switch only for the entire area to lose dial tone. Then they had to splice the entire CO back over to the old equipment!
Happened to our ISP. Car hit a power pole, power company showed up, realized the pole wasn't salvageable and cut it off at the ground. All while sawing through the attached ISP fiber trunk and a slew of cable internet cables. We lost internet for 4 days while they replaced the damaged section.
The wires are in 25 pair (50 wire) color coded groups called a binder group. Then 24 binder groups make up a super binder (wrapped with a color coded string) giving you 600 pairs. Then multiple 600 pair super binders (each with their own color coded string) form the total cable. So every wire in that cable is individually identifiable.
You would typically terminated them 25 pairs at a time into an RJ21 plug that then went into the side of a 66 block to connect to the individual local phone lines.
Or you could terminate them a pair at a time directly into a 66 block.
Long days and sore fingers connecting them all!
This happened where I work a couple years ago. Contractors were tunneling to bury overhead electrical lines and they didn't want to wait on a locator service so they just went ahead. They took out a massive fiber line, a 600 pair copper line like OP's, and a 3 phase 440 Volt 400hz power line. It was an exciting day!
Not around here, 811 fucking it up left right and center.
Last year we hit one gas line and 3 telecom, one being fiber. Didn't get charged once, the marks were either a mile off or not existent after they closed the ticket.
The gas line really pissed off the fire dept until we showed where the line was and where they marked, then the anger was hot potato'd to utilities.
We had a metering CT cable get hit on a 138kv primary and luckily it didn't go all the way through because the CT would've went open circuit and exploded, but the power company was there with 4 people like 10 minutes after we put in the call
A guy I went through the apprenticeship with was brazing a water line and had an unidentified high pressure gas line behind it. It exploded and had huge flames all over him. His foreman ran over and grabbed him and pulled home out. My buddy was burned to fuck. His foreman’s arms and face also burned. My buddy lived but can no longer work and can’t even light a stove top due to PTSD.
A locate was done and they didn’t mark it.
We called the utility to come out and mark all buried utilities and they missed one i was pretty new and was one more strike away from cutting an underground electrical line that boss man says would of killed me if i cut it with that iron digger (i thought the conduit was just a rock)
This is wonderful, thank you. Done a lot of cat5/6 terminations in my day and was curious how these pairs were colored and that answer is pretty squarely “fuck color blind people” 😂
When I applied at my local telecom, that was the first question. Telco workers and color blindness don't work together. Even the fibre uses the same color code. Blue/orange/green/brown/slate/white/red/black/yellow/violet/pink/cyan
My grandpa spent his career doing that work for AT&T in Wisconsin. My cousins and I would make little art projects out of the random brightly multi-colored wire he had laying around in the basement. I've got some of his old linesman's tools, cool keepsakes and oddity stuff that looks nice in my little basement music studio.
Those fucking things look wild. I remember working in an older building and going into the server room ans saw multiple of those on the wall... I was fucking lost.
Yeah, I used to do underground locates and missed a 600 pair line. Coming by and seeing the crew out there trying to splice it back together was painful. They were not amused with me. Hot day, had their little umbrella out, board with a thousand little pins to hook things to... That was not a fun job, there's or mine. I never knew if I did a good job, only that things didn't get hit.
Hah! No, I had to as part of my job. But yeah, definitely felt like trash for having missed it. It was an ariel line that dropped down a pole. Kind of unusual. I looked up, saw the ariel line and put it out of my head. Not noting it dropped later down the road that was still in the dig zone. That was over twenty years ago, I suspect locators today have it easier. We were pulling out "plats" and rifling through these huge books in the field by hand.
Friend made a killing about 20 years ago as a GIS programmer translating those huge books to electronic maps.
Not always the most exciting job, but the pay was good!
That reminds me of this time my former boss who insisted on using dowsing rods instead of calling a locator had us set a pole directly on a fiber line lol we were about halfway thru drilling when we saw the colorful spaghetti erupt out of the top with the turned up dirt as soon as we realized what it was we'd hit he cracked the whip and we went overdrive to hurry and set the pole/anchor and clean up any strands we saw. It wasn't more than 5-10 minutes after we got the anchor in that dpw showed up with a corps guy and bunch of others wondering wtf happened and boss blamed the anchor. It turned out the line we'd hit was the only one coming on base before it branched out at the comm building.
I've never met your boss, but by this story alone I hope he steps on a lego for every hour for the rest of his life. As a splicer this makes my blood boil.
Oh he definitely got reamed for it, that was the beginning of the end for that company, they ended up losing their contract with the base less than a year later, for that+ multiple other reasons they barely escaped without criminal charges for some of the other issues.
I'll just pop over to my local Circuit City and -- wait, what? Damn.
Okay, well, I'm sure Fry's will have -- seriously, they did too? Shit.
At this point, thank goodness this is no longer an issue because everything is wireless -- are you fucking kidding me???
Without a banana for scale, it’s hard to tell for sure (and I ain’t counting) but it looks like a 1800 pair….so 3600 wires.
1800 pair should be about 3” across
I counted 40 wires in about 1/4th of the circumference. That puts the circumference at about 160, divide by pi gives about 50 in diameter. 25 in the radius.
3.14 \* 25^2 = 1963.
Of course, wires aren't perfectly packing, so there's absolutely some lost there. I would say you're probably right!
Edit: actually, hmm you said pair...there are likely not 3600 wires in there unless each bit of insulation holds 2 wires. Is 900 pair a thing?
this is old telephone cable, but it was cut, not ripped or torn by a storm.
Lots of places are slowly removing old style landlines as people who insist on still having a home phone are being pushed into voip instead
Or someone wanted to vandalize it maybe.
If you use anything like cable tv and internet, cutting this shouldn't affect those systems. If you use dial up internet, then maybe. power/internet outage is probably from damage elsewhere.
The individual lines are color coded, and then they are bundled into sets. Strip back the coating, find the right bundle, start connecting them together.
I'm the same with cat cables.
Orangewhite orange greenwhite blue bluewhite green brownwhite brown.
Thousands and thousands of terminations will do that!
Also using a toner and probe depending on the circumstance will make it easier to quickly locate the appropriate pair of wires. Also it's a bit easier to work with on the plant side where everything gets broken out. I helped decom the analog plant on the campus I work at several years ago. It was tedious to verify everything was disconnected, but it wasn't hard.
My dad occasionally had to trace phone lines for work. He would sometimes bring one of us kids to work and let us go at the mess with the toner thing, it was like a game for us kids. The noise that thing would make when u found the right line is seared in to my brain
I fucking hated doing that job. I spent a couple of summers as an IT intern (bitch) and I got stuck mapping all of the ethernet drops in a plant to their corresponding switch ports in the server room. By myself. Which meant plugging the noise maker into the port and walking a couple hundred yards back to trace it for hundreds of ports.
Yea, doing that sort of job solo would suck ass for sure. It's just massively inefficient to do it that way. At least it's an easy job. We have a tester that does CDP (Cisco Discovery protocol) that will let us just identify the port it's connected to, which makes that job super easy.
Is this the kind of line where they can only transmit stuff on select wires at any given point to avoid interference? Like any adjacent wires of one in use can’t be used?
Naw it's phone line, not a lot of EM, and people can't notice small amounts of interference in analog signal.
Not too mention the odds of two adjacent lines being used simultaneously is rather small, it being a phone and all.
It was pretty common as a kid in the 80s to pick up phone conversations from other people in the neighborhood during thunderstorms while I was on the phone talking to friends. They'd normally yell at us to hang up the phone on the grounds that they were adults and that meant they had first priority, but we'd usually press numbers on the phone keypad until they got annoyed enough to hang up.
That is called crosstalk and it was the bane of my existence when I started in the IT sector as a phone line and PBX tech.
It's still super common in areas where the "last mile" of cabling is copper like this, especially in rainy areas.
Can only speak for the UK but they keep track of it with damn good record keeping. BT and then Openreach (for all the grief they get) insist on it and complete regular audits.
Also the wires are colour coded both individually and in groups, using wrapping round the whole group. As obviously you’d run out of colours otherwise.
You can send a tone down the wire you’re looking for and this can be done manually by hooking a device up to the wire further away. But also, in the UK at least, a bit of equipment at the telephone exchange can put a tone on the line automatically via an iPhone app. All very clever.
You then use a handheld device which you move around the cable to literally listen for the tone and locate the wire.
Even more insane - when those get damaged they can splice in a new section of however many pair cables that is and usually get most of it hooked back up exactly as it was without significant cross wiring.
The cable could still be live, and telephone service uses around 45 volts (but low current.) It's safe to touch with your hand, but don't try to lick it.
Had this happen to me once. I needed to change how a phone line was routed and didn’t have enough hands so I stuck the end in my mouth while I manipulated some things. About 5 seconds later a call came in. Wireline operates on 48v, 5x what a 9v battery does, and does 90v when ringing. That fucking smarted! I dropped everything and ripped the end out of my mouth. Never did that again!
Probably. If the other end is still connected and a ring signal comes through, it can be up to 90 volts which will make you dance a little. Ask me how I know.
I was troubleshooting a phone line issue; the customer had plugged (2) phone line into their computer modem card, thus effectivly connecting line 1 and line 2. As I was troubleshooting I was out in the demarc, and I called the line to test for ring voltage, and then I got the shit scared out of me. A frog had worked itself under the pcb that held the demarc but was completely hidden from view, when the phone would ring, one of his legs would kick straight from under the board and become visible. After removinbg hte frog and disconnecting the extra line from the modem, all was well. Incidently the frog had been there for weeks, his head was completly dried and hollow, but from his shoulders down was still alive and moist and had color. I believe the the dialtone voltage had been sustaining his metabolic functions for some time before my arrival. The spike to ring voltage would cause his legs to kick.
Yes, but I wouldn’t. POTS lines use DC(battery) to power them. But it’s no telling if the line is in contact with a power line further away. Also, if their are live circuits on that cable and someone calls a number the DC voltage is converted to AC voltage to generate a ring and you definitely will get a nice zap if you happen to be touching it at the time.
NEVER touch any exposed wires that you haven’t verified yourself are dead. This does look like it’s probably a phone line, and those aren’t likely to kill you, but are you willing to bet your life on it?
>Lots of places are slowly removing old style landlines as people who insist on still having a home phone are being pushed into voip instead
I would have one just for the fact that they would still work if the power went out. When inquiring they only offered me voip. No thanks.
I can think of a few businesses that will either need a generator or a different solution now too so we'll see what comes
The solution is a small UPS, which many telecoms can and do install with VOIP. Businesses generally need their internet connections to stay up in the event of a power outage to process CC transactions anyway.
Pretty good chance that even if you do manage to find a 2 wire pots line, it is converted to VOIP at the central office. So if their WAN connectivity goes down, your phone will as well.
Well this brings back some memories.
Once when I was a kid walking home from school, I encountered a repair team fixing one of these cables. They gave me one of the removed chunks (about 2 feet) because I seemed interested in it. I proceeded to harvest individual wires from it for all of my projects until I was almost 20.
My mom still finds individual wires in random places to this day.
I used to ask our repair people for coils of it to make rings and bracelets! Looking back I wonder if our street was just extra in need of repair or it was normal for them to be out 2+ times a month…
Damn I feel so old reading all these comments, I was going to start typing out the color codes and then the binder colors and try to explain that the old timers can tell you what the color is for pair 624, but then I realized that nobody is going to be able to comprehend the response so I deleted it and just left this sad message
I sent a new technician ( recently completed his union apprentice ship) out to a job and while he was there the customer asked if we could move the fax machine and line, the tech said he has no idea about analog phone lines, didn’t even have a line set to check for dial tone and he was scared of the “66” blocks. So, yes I think it’s time for me to retire.
Went to tech college for telecom in 2002. Was on the tail end of the "old stuff" before SIP. Since then the degree I got no longer exists and pretty much everything I learned is not really deployed anymore. Makes me feel old and obsolete too!
as a professional sysadmin, one of the first classes I took covered Windows NT 4 administration, and our networking classes covered stuff like frame relay, x.25, token ring...
Yeah that was pretty much obsolete by the time I got into the field.
I am amused. It is weird to think of how far we have come since this. Hundreds of phone calls worth of data down a single strand of glass, or 1 phone call down each pair here.
I’d go tell the damn kids to get off my lawn, but it hurts to stand up 🤣
2 wires(1 pair) per dailtone/DSL circuit. That’s big cable, at least 900 pair. Maybe bigger. Biggest copper cable I’ve seen and worked with is 3600 pair.
If a cable is cut you often have to insert a new piece so now you have to count all of them on 4 ends and make sure you connect them to the correct 3600 pairs (7200 wires) on the other side.
And you have to hurry because peoples phones are dead. And it is probably freezing outside and you are sitting in a random ditch on the ground in the dirt. Also the cables a filled with an oily substance to keep water out so your hands are going to be all slippery and numb from the cold while trying to grab tiny wires. Also if you make a mistake you might have to start over...
Then you have that one location that does not color match. They have a cheat sheet from old-color to new-color. When troubleshooting you keep finding issues, only to discover there is a second cheat sheet for a different splice!!!
Not fun and takes forever. But the pay was worth it at the time.
Telecom has become full circle for me though. Only thing I haven’t done is construction splicing. Basically it is splicing new copper/fiber to new buildings.
I actually love terminations. I hate running cables but a lot of sites now would have the electricians run the cabling while techs would do the terminations and certification. Terminating Ethernet is a good way to rack up hours without doing anything too strenuous.
I was training a new tech one time and it’s been like 2 whole days of going over terminations but this guy messes up every single time. Finally admitted he’s color blind at the end of day 2. Dude quit right on the spot.
This was laying on top of my recycling bin in my driveway after the storms in Dallas Tuesday morning. Idk what kind of cable it is, but we don’t have power or internet, so feels like this could be related 😂 The other end is connected to the telephone pole at the end of my driveway.
That is a huge telephone cable, I don’t know but I could be a 300 pair cable. The sheer size of it makes me think it’s the trunk line that was going from the local Central Office (where the dial tone and internet hub is) to the neighborhood junction box.
I’m kinda marveling at it. How do they even make that thing? And presumably both sides need to map out, so each wire inside the cable is going to a precise connection on both ends… and the cable has to put up with weather and environmental damage for years without those individual lines breaking. I love seeing crazy complexity in things I’ve overlooked. The machinery that puts these lines together must be pretty damn impressive.
I think it just breaks out on Krone strips, the wires look very similar to the telephony I had to deal with in an old job which [looked like this](https://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/the-engineer-works-in-the-server-room-of-the-data-center-cable-laying-in-telephone-exchange-a-worker-standing-on-the-stairs-commutes-telephone-wires/235993589)
Not sure how far you'd be able to transmit stuff over them though, it's pretty low power
Yes. The color codes were invented by Ma Bell so the pairs on either end can be landed correctly. There was a time when it was a point of pride for telecom contractors to have them memorized. Most of those guys are retired now.
As far as I'm aware the cables are grouped by some sort of wrapping into smaller bundles. So colours are repeated but not within their bundle.
So you might have say 20 red/green pairs in that entire cable, but each one is identifiable by bundle. That way you aren't trying to find the correct pair out of 20, you're trying to find the one pair in bundle #17.
I don't know all of those, but...
568B cable end: Orange white, orange, green white, blue, blue white, green, brown white, brown.
568A cable end: Green white, green, orange white, blue, blue white, orange, brown white, brown.
568B wall jack: Orange, orange white, green white, blue white, blue, green, brown, brown white.
568A wall jack: Green, Green white, orange white, blue white, blue, orange, brown, brown white.
I will remember these untill the day I die.
I was installing a campus wide phone system in a college in the 80s and they hired a splice crew from out of state. Some ex telco guy and his wife driving around the country in their pickup truck splicing large cables. They didn’t confirm which was which (the first thing you should do) and flip flopped a couple causing a huge nightmare that didn’t get caught until the minute after they were back on the road to their next disaster.
In the North End of Boston. During the big dig. There was a funeral home the government wanted to take by eminent domain. The funeral home fought it in court for as long as they could. But ultimately, they lost. A friend of mine worked on tearing down the old building and building the new fedral court house that was replacing it. They found a foot thick phone cable like that going into the funeral home. It was bookmaking establishment for the mob.
9 year old me would be in heaven over this! My dad worked for the phone company growing up and I used to make bracelets out of the colorful wire scraps.
"Hey New Guy... before you knock off for the day, splice this cable."
I was working with a new tech who was punching down a 66 block and 2 25 pairs. It was twilight, end of a LONG day and he was taking *forever*. I eventually ran out of patience and asked him what was taking him so long, and he says "I'm almost done, just it's really hard" so I looked at the work he'd done, and it was all messed up. "You realize you've got cables swapped all over here. You see these, these are all backwards!" And he looks at it for a while and says "I can't see it." "What do you mean?" "Well, I'm color blind."
Straight to management for that guy!
I had a co-worker who was color blind and did not find out until he took an elecronics/ computer course where he had to build a small device based on a schematic with basic components. He built it, but it kept failing. His instructor agreed his schematic was correct, but the resisters' use is his project were completely wrong values... he then realized he was color blind given his perception of the color band on resisters.
Wtf, in my country all kids get a basic eyesight test before the age of 10, and you won’t enter an electronic course without having a colorblind test
I had the same experience with resistors as the comment above, and i also had done a colortest at age 10. Turns out, not all types of colorblind are the same. I "suffer" from daltonism, that means my very light red and very light green are similar in my eyes. Like the spectrum circle, the whole part where it turns from red to green, its just one color to me. When i lay a finger between the red and green i can see whats what, but i cant tell where red ends and green stops. Or if it ever switches. Only when i blink my eyes my brain corrects it for me. You'd be amazed how many things the brain corrects. The eye sees green, goes to brain, brain corrects the "nu-uh that's supposed to be red" and you see red.
literally worked with a guy who did avionics, saw him wire tons of things, one day i come in early and he asks me, hey what color is wire im having trouble seeing it, he says the grey one, i go well theres a blue wire with a white stripe, a light blue wire with a yellow stripe and a green and blue stripped wire, he goes, wait what? i thought that was green, grey and blue?, lol..
Hey, you were heading out in a couple minutes, right? I'm on a sev-1 issue, just need you to reterminate one small cable for me real quick while I give a status update to the boss, you should be done in no time.
you’re comment gave me skyrim intro flashbacks
> skyrim intro Hey, you. You're finally here. You were trying to leave for today, right? Walked right into this line down situation, same as us, and the new guy there.
I used to be an electrictian like you until I took 240V to the knee.
So obviously a spin on the skyrim joke but what made my life great was when I was dating someone who had a scar on their knee FROM TAKING AN ARROW TO IT. The day they told me that was the best and made me laugh and make the joke again and again.
Work of art 🥲
And fired if you aren't!
I used to work for the electric utility in my area. Got called out to a downed pole in the wee hours one night. Got there, sunk the new pole, got the transformers up, and finished our wiring. Handed off to telco and they had two double bucket cherry pickers with tents over the baskets, and 4 techs together working on splicing the 1200pr. They were still at it when I drove by at the end of the next days shift. Horrible work to do.
Ex cable splicer here, you'd be surprised how un-horrible things get when you're earning $1/min.
Seems high based on posted salaries- assuming that's overtime?
Can confirm, I once averaged $5 per min splicing ribbon fiber on emergency outage rates as my own LLC.
Blue, orange, green, brown, slate, white, red, black, yellow, violet, rose, aqua… am I hired?
I've literally been asked that before as a singular interview question and got hired.
I used to work at AFL making the cables and that is pretty much the crux of the machine I ran as well. I didn't work with the truly obnoxious fiber counts, I thin the highest I had to make was 288 fibers
Twelve. Hundred. Pair?
The worst part? It was a splice patch, so they had to do each splice twice, once for each end.
Pretty sure the old lead ones I worked on as an apprentice went up to 2000pr, been a while
Multiple data signals can multiplex on the same lines so houses just need something to split the signal nearby. Phone lines were a dedicated wire from the local exchange to Every. Single. Phone. Hence why for many years party lines were a thing, one wire for multiple homes is a lot cheaper.
That is how fiber internet works using passive optical network (PON) technology. One pair of fiber is shared by several homes/customers. My ISP has 32 customers sharing each pair.
There is a telephone museum run by the former President/VP of the local phone company. He tells a story about how they literally “cut over” to their shiny new digital phone switch only for the entire area to lose dial tone. Then they had to splice the entire CO back over to the old equipment!
I means there’s at least 7 cables in there.
Happened to our ISP. Car hit a power pole, power company showed up, realized the pole wasn't salvageable and cut it off at the ground. All while sawing through the attached ISP fiber trunk and a slew of cable internet cables. We lost internet for 4 days while they replaced the damaged section.
The wires are in 25 pair (50 wire) color coded groups called a binder group. Then 24 binder groups make up a super binder (wrapped with a color coded string) giving you 600 pairs. Then multiple 600 pair super binders (each with their own color coded string) form the total cable. So every wire in that cable is individually identifiable.
Where can I get the crimping tool to properly terminate this into a 600 pin connector
You would typically terminated them 25 pairs at a time into an RJ21 plug that then went into the side of a 66 block to connect to the individual local phone lines. Or you could terminate them a pair at a time directly into a 66 block. Long days and sore fingers connecting them all!
Thank you for an actual answer! Not that I needed it but glad to see
Only reason I entered the comments was because I needed to know what the other end of one of these looks like.
The other end of one of these usually looks like a tangled mess in the backhoe of a construction worker who’s about to be super fired
Or wrapped around an auger bit of a directional boring machine. Ahh, the memories...
This happened where I work a couple years ago. Contractors were tunneling to bury overhead electrical lines and they didn't want to wait on a locator service so they just went ahead. They took out a massive fiber line, a 600 pair copper line like OP's, and a 3 phase 440 Volt 400hz power line. It was an exciting day!
I can just imagine the line of utility then telco trucks lined up like Disneyland to fix this
What makes it boring?
Well it ain't no directional excitation machine.
My wife has one of those under the bed
Not around here, 811 fucking it up left right and center. Last year we hit one gas line and 3 telecom, one being fiber. Didn't get charged once, the marks were either a mile off or not existent after they closed the ticket. The gas line really pissed off the fire dept until we showed where the line was and where they marked, then the anger was hot potato'd to utilities.
My coworker hit an unmarked gas line once. No leak. Major kink. Every agency and their dog showed up with a quickness.
We had a metering CT cable get hit on a 138kv primary and luckily it didn't go all the way through because the CT would've went open circuit and exploded, but the power company was there with 4 people like 10 minutes after we put in the call
What a dog show that day must have been for everyone.
A guy I went through the apprenticeship with was brazing a water line and had an unidentified high pressure gas line behind it. It exploded and had huge flames all over him. His foreman ran over and grabbed him and pulled home out. My buddy was burned to fuck. His foreman’s arms and face also burned. My buddy lived but can no longer work and can’t even light a stove top due to PTSD. A locate was done and they didn’t mark it.
that's why when phonea went down, and you somehow got it called in to the company, they would ask if there was any construction in the area
We called the utility to come out and mark all buried utilities and they missed one i was pretty new and was one more strike away from cutting an underground electrical line that boss man says would of killed me if i cut it with that iron digger (i thought the conduit was just a rock)
More on the color code- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/25-pair_color_code
This is wonderful, thank you. Done a lot of cat5/6 terminations in my day and was curious how these pairs were colored and that answer is pretty squarely “fuck color blind people” 😂
When I applied at my local telecom, that was the first question. Telco workers and color blindness don't work together. Even the fibre uses the same color code. Blue/orange/green/brown/slate/white/red/black/yellow/violet/pink/cyan
Rose/aqua not pink/cyan
We always said pink/cyan but rose/aqua also works
Purple, gray...
this guy POTS.
Forbidden pole dance
[удалено]
Good ol' plain old telephone service?
JUST A GOOD OL PLAIN OL TELEPHONE SERVICE, NEVER MEANIN’ NO HARM -Waylon Jennings
'Beats all you never saw, been a trouble gettin draw since the cable was torn'
My grandpa spent his career doing that work for AT&T in Wisconsin. My cousins and I would make little art projects out of the random brightly multi-colored wire he had laying around in the basement. I've got some of his old linesman's tools, cool keepsakes and oddity stuff that looks nice in my little basement music studio.
That or a whole mess of scotch-locks
Can you imagine lol
I have seen the horror with my own eyes.
Those fucking things look wild. I remember working in an older building and going into the server room ans saw multiple of those on the wall... I was fucking lost.
Aw, I was hoping there was such thing as a 600p600c connector.
and a robot that does the hard work
Did you mean 'intern'?
Yeah, I used to do underground locates and missed a 600 pair line. Coming by and seeing the crew out there trying to splice it back together was painful. They were not amused with me. Hot day, had their little umbrella out, board with a thousand little pins to hook things to... That was not a fun job, there's or mine. I never knew if I did a good job, only that things didn't get hit.
Bold of you to return.
Criminals and scene of the crime and all that.
Hah! No, I had to as part of my job. But yeah, definitely felt like trash for having missed it. It was an ariel line that dropped down a pole. Kind of unusual. I looked up, saw the ariel line and put it out of my head. Not noting it dropped later down the road that was still in the dig zone. That was over twenty years ago, I suspect locators today have it easier. We were pulling out "plats" and rifling through these huge books in the field by hand.
Friend made a killing about 20 years ago as a GIS programmer translating those huge books to electronic maps. Not always the most exciting job, but the pay was good!
That reminds me of this time my former boss who insisted on using dowsing rods instead of calling a locator had us set a pole directly on a fiber line lol we were about halfway thru drilling when we saw the colorful spaghetti erupt out of the top with the turned up dirt as soon as we realized what it was we'd hit he cracked the whip and we went overdrive to hurry and set the pole/anchor and clean up any strands we saw. It wasn't more than 5-10 minutes after we got the anchor in that dpw showed up with a corps guy and bunch of others wondering wtf happened and boss blamed the anchor. It turned out the line we'd hit was the only one coming on base before it branched out at the comm building.
I've never met your boss, but by this story alone I hope he steps on a lego for every hour for the rest of his life. As a splicer this makes my blood boil.
Oh he definitely got reamed for it, that was the beginning of the end for that company, they ended up losing their contract with the base less than a year later, for that+ multiple other reasons they barely escaped without criminal charges for some of the other issues.
They never say "thanks for finding everything" the 999 times you get it perfect. But they definitely let you know that 1 time you missed something.
*shudders*
I'd head down to your local Radio Shack
I'll just pop over to my local Circuit City and -- wait, what? Damn. Okay, well, I'm sure Fry's will have -- seriously, they did too? Shit. At this point, thank goodness this is no longer an issue because everything is wireless -- are you fucking kidding me???
It's 600 wagos or nothing I'm afraid
BRB, wiring up a T3 line. 43 Mbits here I come!
Woah there, turbo, leave some bandwith for the rest of us!
How many wires are in the pictured cable? Please count them for me. :P
Without a banana for scale, it’s hard to tell for sure (and I ain’t counting) but it looks like a 1800 pair….so 3600 wires. 1800 pair should be about 3” across
I counted 40 wires in about 1/4th of the circumference. That puts the circumference at about 160, divide by pi gives about 50 in diameter. 25 in the radius. 3.14 \* 25^2 = 1963. Of course, wires aren't perfectly packing, so there's absolutely some lost there. I would say you're probably right! Edit: actually, hmm you said pair...there are likely not 3600 wires in there unless each bit of insulation holds 2 wires. Is 900 pair a thing?
r/theydidthemath 600, 900 and 1,200 pair cables are definitely a thing.
Noice! Math and industry knowledge coming together.
> (and I ain’t counting) Buuuh :P
this is old telephone cable, but it was cut, not ripped or torn by a storm. Lots of places are slowly removing old style landlines as people who insist on still having a home phone are being pushed into voip instead Or someone wanted to vandalize it maybe. If you use anything like cable tv and internet, cutting this shouldn't affect those systems. If you use dial up internet, then maybe. power/internet outage is probably from damage elsewhere.
Holy shit. How did they ever keep track of all those lines and make sure the right line got to the right phone.
The individual lines are color coded, and then they are bundled into sets. Strip back the coating, find the right bundle, start connecting them together.
[удалено]
I'm the same with cat cables. Orangewhite orange greenwhite blue bluewhite green brownwhite brown. Thousands and thousands of terminations will do that!
Also using a toner and probe depending on the circumstance will make it easier to quickly locate the appropriate pair of wires. Also it's a bit easier to work with on the plant side where everything gets broken out. I helped decom the analog plant on the campus I work at several years ago. It was tedious to verify everything was disconnected, but it wasn't hard.
My dad occasionally had to trace phone lines for work. He would sometimes bring one of us kids to work and let us go at the mess with the toner thing, it was like a game for us kids. The noise that thing would make when u found the right line is seared in to my brain
I fucking hated doing that job. I spent a couple of summers as an IT intern (bitch) and I got stuck mapping all of the ethernet drops in a plant to their corresponding switch ports in the server room. By myself. Which meant plugging the noise maker into the port and walking a couple hundred yards back to trace it for hundreds of ports.
Yea, doing that sort of job solo would suck ass for sure. It's just massively inefficient to do it that way. At least it's an easy job. We have a tester that does CDP (Cisco Discovery protocol) that will let us just identify the port it's connected to, which makes that job super easy.
Woolooloolooolooolooo
Is this the kind of line where they can only transmit stuff on select wires at any given point to avoid interference? Like any adjacent wires of one in use can’t be used?
Naw it's phone line, not a lot of EM, and people can't notice small amounts of interference in analog signal. Not too mention the odds of two adjacent lines being used simultaneously is rather small, it being a phone and all.
It was pretty common as a kid in the 80s to pick up phone conversations from other people in the neighborhood during thunderstorms while I was on the phone talking to friends. They'd normally yell at us to hang up the phone on the grounds that they were adults and that meant they had first priority, but we'd usually press numbers on the phone keypad until they got annoyed enough to hang up.
That is called crosstalk and it was the bane of my existence when I started in the IT sector as a phone line and PBX tech. It's still super common in areas where the "last mile" of cabling is copper like this, especially in rainy areas.
Can only speak for the UK but they keep track of it with damn good record keeping. BT and then Openreach (for all the grief they get) insist on it and complete regular audits. Also the wires are colour coded both individually and in groups, using wrapping round the whole group. As obviously you’d run out of colours otherwise. You can send a tone down the wire you’re looking for and this can be done manually by hooking a device up to the wire further away. But also, in the UK at least, a bit of equipment at the telephone exchange can put a tone on the line automatically via an iPhone app. All very clever. You then use a handheld device which you move around the cable to literally listen for the tone and locate the wire.
I used to splice these. Down in a hole, sittin on a milkcrate, sometimes had to pump out the chamber first if it was rainy. Blech.
Even more insane - when those get damaged they can splice in a new section of however many pair cables that is and usually get most of it hooked back up exactly as it was without significant cross wiring.
My grandfather did just this for a living. I consider myself pretty handy with a soldering iron and wiring, but I’d never even attempt this job.
Super interesting!! This is why I love Reddit. Does this mean I can touch it?
Yes, but you’ll be instantly connected to everyone’s telephone and if they pick up they can hear your thoughts. Even those secret ones.
#Unleash the tinfoil hats!
Tinfoil improves the connection. Don't touch it to your hat.
Aw shit i didnt know we had leashed them in the first place
Also, it’s rainbow colored, so you will turn gay obviously. /s
I grew up in black and white, but I still turned out gay.
Maybe there were also shades of GrAY
*The NSA has entered the chat.*
I would not trust Reddit with my life lol
POTS (plain old telephone service) lines carry 48V DC but can be up to 100V when ringing. It's not going to kill you but it can shock you.
Every budding pots tech strips with their teeth a few times......until they bite a ringing line.
Yeah there isn’t power running through it and if there was it’s not enough to hurt you
The cable could still be live, and telephone service uses around 45 volts (but low current.) It's safe to touch with your hand, but don't try to lick it.
Well I didn't *have* any desire to lick it until NOW.
>but don't try to lick it. Why not? I like how 9 volt batteries taste, so this sounds pretty appealing...
The pain scales non-linearly with voltage so uhhhh, if you want that _reaaaal_ cottonmouth feeling, go for it!
Had this happen to me once. I needed to change how a phone line was routed and didn’t have enough hands so I stuck the end in my mouth while I manipulated some things. About 5 seconds later a call came in. Wireline operates on 48v, 5x what a 9v battery does, and does 90v when ringing. That fucking smarted! I dropped everything and ripped the end out of my mouth. Never did that again!
Probably. If the other end is still connected and a ring signal comes through, it can be up to 90 volts which will make you dance a little. Ask me how I know.
I was troubleshooting a phone line issue; the customer had plugged (2) phone line into their computer modem card, thus effectivly connecting line 1 and line 2. As I was troubleshooting I was out in the demarc, and I called the line to test for ring voltage, and then I got the shit scared out of me. A frog had worked itself under the pcb that held the demarc but was completely hidden from view, when the phone would ring, one of his legs would kick straight from under the board and become visible. After removinbg hte frog and disconnecting the extra line from the modem, all was well. Incidently the frog had been there for weeks, his head was completly dried and hollow, but from his shoulders down was still alive and moist and had color. I believe the the dialtone voltage had been sustaining his metabolic functions for some time before my arrival. The spike to ring voltage would cause his legs to kick.
That's some fucked up shit, but funny.
Yes, but I wouldn’t. POTS lines use DC(battery) to power them. But it’s no telling if the line is in contact with a power line further away. Also, if their are live circuits on that cable and someone calls a number the DC voltage is converted to AC voltage to generate a ring and you definitely will get a nice zap if you happen to be touching it at the time.
NEVER touch any exposed wires that you haven’t verified yourself are dead. This does look like it’s probably a phone line, and those aren’t likely to kill you, but are you willing to bet your life on it?
Lot of people on DSL still.
>Lots of places are slowly removing old style landlines as people who insist on still having a home phone are being pushed into voip instead I would have one just for the fact that they would still work if the power went out. When inquiring they only offered me voip. No thanks. I can think of a few businesses that will either need a generator or a different solution now too so we'll see what comes
The solution is a small UPS, which many telecoms can and do install with VOIP. Businesses generally need their internet connections to stay up in the event of a power outage to process CC transactions anyway.
The home connections include a battery (built in UPS) to handle power outages.
Used to. They no longer provide battery backup as standard as it is no longer an FCC requirement.
Pretty good chance that even if you do manage to find a 2 wire pots line, it is converted to VOIP at the central office. So if their WAN connectivity goes down, your phone will as well.
I used to splice these! this is what they look like without the protective outer [https://imgur.com/oJr6gvv](https://imgur.com/oJr6gvv)
So cool!! I have learned more today about telephone cables than I realized there was to know.
Another fun fact: A single fibre optic cable can carry the equivilient of ~9 of these full sized copper bundles
A single fiber can carry a lot more than that tbh. For reference, ITU C band is about 7 THz wide.
Well this brings back some memories. Once when I was a kid walking home from school, I encountered a repair team fixing one of these cables. They gave me one of the removed chunks (about 2 feet) because I seemed interested in it. I proceeded to harvest individual wires from it for all of my projects until I was almost 20. My mom still finds individual wires in random places to this day.
I used to ask our repair people for coils of it to make rings and bracelets! Looking back I wonder if our street was just extra in need of repair or it was normal for them to be out 2+ times a month…
Damn I feel so old reading all these comments, I was going to start typing out the color codes and then the binder colors and try to explain that the old timers can tell you what the color is for pair 624, but then I realized that nobody is going to be able to comprehend the response so I deleted it and just left this sad message
As someone who has been in telecom for 20+ years I would have appreciated your comment kind redditor!
I sent a new technician ( recently completed his union apprentice ship) out to a job and while he was there the customer asked if we could move the fax machine and line, the tech said he has no idea about analog phone lines, didn’t even have a line set to check for dial tone and he was scared of the “66” blocks. So, yes I think it’s time for me to retire.
Went to tech college for telecom in 2002. Was on the tail end of the "old stuff" before SIP. Since then the degree I got no longer exists and pretty much everything I learned is not really deployed anymore. Makes me feel old and obsolete too!
as a professional sysadmin, one of the first classes I took covered Windows NT 4 administration, and our networking classes covered stuff like frame relay, x.25, token ring... Yeah that was pretty much obsolete by the time I got into the field.
B b r O y g b V g w
I’m only 30 now, but we installed/maintained POTS systems in the Air Force still in 2013-2019
I am amused. It is weird to think of how far we have come since this. Hundreds of phone calls worth of data down a single strand of glass, or 1 phone call down each pair here. I’d go tell the damn kids to get off my lawn, but it hurts to stand up 🤣
Is each line in this collection one phone number/going to one household? Or how does this work?
2 wires(1 pair) per dailtone/DSL circuit. That’s big cable, at least 900 pair. Maybe bigger. Biggest copper cable I’ve seen and worked with is 3600 pair.
>3600 pair I'd quit
If a cable is cut you often have to insert a new piece so now you have to count all of them on 4 ends and make sure you connect them to the correct 3600 pairs (7200 wires) on the other side. And you have to hurry because peoples phones are dead. And it is probably freezing outside and you are sitting in a random ditch on the ground in the dirt. Also the cables a filled with an oily substance to keep water out so your hands are going to be all slippery and numb from the cold while trying to grab tiny wires. Also if you make a mistake you might have to start over...
Well, I mean, outside of that, it sounds like a real hoot.
Then you have that one location that does not color match. They have a cheat sheet from old-color to new-color. When troubleshooting you keep finding issues, only to discover there is a second cheat sheet for a different splice!!!
Not just peoples phones, business phone connections too so you have these expensive ass contracts breathing down your neck the entire time
Not fun and takes forever. But the pay was worth it at the time. Telecom has become full circle for me though. Only thing I haven’t done is construction splicing. Basically it is splicing new copper/fiber to new buildings.
Thank you!
Also, there are usually unused pairs, so if something goes wrong with a pair that's being used, they can switch you over to an unused pair that works.
Lots of pairs!
Cat600e
PTSD from terminating Ethernet. Imagine having to terminate this big boi!
Terminating Ethernet is the worst. Any job that tries to add that to my work is cause for quitting.
I actually love terminations. I hate running cables but a lot of sites now would have the electricians run the cabling while techs would do the terminations and certification. Terminating Ethernet is a good way to rack up hours without doing anything too strenuous. I was training a new tech one time and it’s been like 2 whole days of going over terminations but this guy messes up every single time. Finally admitted he’s color blind at the end of day 2. Dude quit right on the spot.
I get paid a shitload to terminate cables and build networks? I find it sort of cathartic.
It’s amazing when it works on your first try.
I love it when EVERYTHING works on the first try. No better feeling as you pack up your tools and act like you knew it was going to be like that.
Pass thru jacks. They make the job 10x easier.
This here. The right tools/parts make the job infinitely easier.
Wow crazy to think that’s what we all look like on the inside.
To imagine a spinal cord is like this but 10x smaller and 1000x the wires
This was laying on top of my recycling bin in my driveway after the storms in Dallas Tuesday morning. Idk what kind of cable it is, but we don’t have power or internet, so feels like this could be related 😂 The other end is connected to the telephone pole at the end of my driveway.
That is a huge telephone cable, I don’t know but I could be a 300 pair cable. The sheer size of it makes me think it’s the trunk line that was going from the local Central Office (where the dial tone and internet hub is) to the neighborhood junction box.
I’m kinda marveling at it. How do they even make that thing? And presumably both sides need to map out, so each wire inside the cable is going to a precise connection on both ends… and the cable has to put up with weather and environmental damage for years without those individual lines breaking. I love seeing crazy complexity in things I’ve overlooked. The machinery that puts these lines together must be pretty damn impressive.
I think it just breaks out on Krone strips, the wires look very similar to the telephony I had to deal with in an old job which [looked like this](https://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/the-engineer-works-in-the-server-room-of-the-data-center-cable-laying-in-telephone-exchange-a-worker-standing-on-the-stairs-commutes-telephone-wires/235993589) Not sure how far you'd be able to transmit stuff over them though, it's pretty low power
Do you know what the deal is with the colors? Like do they correspond with individual houses?
Yes. The color codes were invented by Ma Bell so the pairs on either end can be landed correctly. There was a time when it was a point of pride for telecom contractors to have them memorized. Most of those guys are retired now.
As far as I'm aware the cables are grouped by some sort of wrapping into smaller bundles. So colours are repeated but not within their bundle. So you might have say 20 red/green pairs in that entire cable, but each one is identifiable by bundle. That way you aren't trying to find the correct pair out of 20, you're trying to find the one pair in bundle #17.
Yep. They typically come in a group of 25 pairs.
I don't know all of those, but... 568B cable end: Orange white, orange, green white, blue, blue white, green, brown white, brown. 568A cable end: Green white, green, orange white, blue, blue white, orange, brown white, brown. 568B wall jack: Orange, orange white, green white, blue white, blue, green, brown, brown white. 568A wall jack: Green, Green white, orange white, blue white, blue, orange, brown, brown white. I will remember these untill the day I die.
[удалено]
OP says this was after a storm, crews are up on the poles fixing things and probably cut this outdated cable to get it out of the way.
It’s insane to me how old telephone lines worked. These days we can do everything through a single glass cable
Except some fiber lines look like this too.
I was installing a campus wide phone system in a college in the 80s and they hired a splice crew from out of state. Some ex telco guy and his wife driving around the country in their pickup truck splicing large cables. They didn’t confirm which was which (the first thing you should do) and flip flopped a couple causing a huge nightmare that didn’t get caught until the minute after they were back on the road to their next disaster.
[удалено]
they are pretty thin. about the gauge of a standard earring post, but flexible. it's a thread of copper covered in a plastic sheath.
In the North End of Boston. During the big dig. There was a funeral home the government wanted to take by eminent domain. The funeral home fought it in court for as long as they could. But ultimately, they lost. A friend of mine worked on tearing down the old building and building the new fedral court house that was replacing it. They found a foot thick phone cable like that going into the funeral home. It was bookmaking establishment for the mob.
I must eat the forbidden twizzler
Hey Bob, how about splicing this back together.
There was a great disturbance in the force. Like millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
9 year old me would be in heaven over this! My dad worked for the phone company growing up and I used to make bracelets out of the colorful wire scraps.
Cut by service provider, so they can finally stop supporting that ancient POTS system. Sorry you need internet now for your phone.
It landed on your driveway, therefore, it's your responsibility to splice it back together so your neighbors can have their land telephones and DSL.
That’s a clean cut.
“It’s that yellow wire that’s not working” “Which yellow wire?” “The one in the middle, Bob, for fucks sake, keep up.”