atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Telephone Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring CATV question

The office building my friend manages recently had cable TV installed from the street and into each phone room. I'm not really familiar with their outside plant stuff, so I was confused when I saw this cable running through the building. There is no plastic jacket, it's just aluminum (I think).
Perhaps Hal or someone who knows more about the CATV industry will chime in.

Jeff
First floor, from entrance in the basement through the garage and up-

Second floor closet

This floor closet (end)

It's legit, Jeff. Being non-jacketed, that cable poses no fire spread risk. Believe it or not, prior to the development of plenum-rated cable, we got our 25 pair cable delivered the same way: A hard outer aluminum tubular jacket with a traditional twisted pair cable inside.

Talk about a pain in the ass to run and terminate!

Yup. What Ed said. When fire resistant cable was first required we found ourselves putting in all sorts of stuff - aluminum clad cable among them. I did one job with aluminum clad 25 pair and quad. What a PITA!

And yes, here in NYC the cable companies will use aluminum clad stuff for risers/feeders/whatever - sometimes. Doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason - maybe they just use whatever's in the warehouse at the time....

Sam

Wow, never heard of aluminum clad phone wire (except for the rodent shield on OSP stuff)
Time Warner did a halfway decent job on this install, I guess. Backboard space is a premium due to the cluster in those phone rooms.

The distribution install looks good because it was probably done by a staff installation crew.

Just wait a few years until the piecework installers get in there and have coax going all over the place.

Yup, that's plenum cable. And nice job by the way.

-Hal

It does look good. I've seen our local cable co. use RG11 to supply a neighborhood because a section of hardline was bad. Ran it along a privacy fence and heaped the extra slack at the ground. someone hit it with a mower, so cable co just splices it back and leaves it laying.
when they finally fixed the hardline several weeks later (was cut again) they left 200'+ of direct burial RG11 laying in the bushes, so obviously I retrieved it. was told by fellow ham radio ops it can be used on antenna stuff even though ham radio uses 50 Ohm and CATV is 75 Ohm.

The ceilings are stuffed in this building, I am SURE the installers don't carry plenum RG-6. Will be interesting to see the end results.

Was mighty nice of them to leave all those spigots unterminated for you lol. I guess they don't worry about ingress on their plant there.

Yeah I did notice that!
In the other building he manages, the taps are in locked enclosures with those funky tamper proof screws that the cable company likes to use.