There are, literally, thousands of these terminals in western PA. They can be found on poles, buildings, under trailers, in ceilings, in basements and anywhere an OSP craftsperson was told to "go hang a terminal" for the PBX techs. The reason is simple. The terminal, if not unsprung and not bent, is water resistant, mounts to just about any surface and can be fitted with carbon or gas protectors or it can be used just as a connection point. They were 6, 12, 16 and 25 pair units with either lead or pic connection cables and could have both in and out block connection cables for span use. Ed is correct, these were initially designed for drop cable and not for JK or JKT or in this instance, 4 pair Cat 5. To insure some level of water resistance, those cables are to be installed into the housing through those rubber grommets as Ed mentioned.
I keep a few dozen gas protectors on the trucks because when there's a static problem or an outright dead line, there's almost always a bad carbon in the terminal. Since the Verizon techs around here don't carry protectors like that anymore, they just remove the bad carbons and leave the pair unprotected. We are usually called out first to see where the problem might be, so we just replace the protectors.
Rcaman
