atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Pictures of Ugly Cabling Work IX

Thanks Jeff! The brochure has a date of 2013...a fairly recent publication.

Picture doesnt have great detail but it looks older, like it's the plain ol quiet front screw blocks. But that's the terminal you dont need to worry about that anyway


Besides that I see 66 blocks for telephone demarc, and 66 blocks for the building wires. Someone put up a couple krone blocks too, and theres some pretty old pbx/something with power still on, hopefully not still in use

HAHAHAHAHA.

yes, easy, just takes time. it'll take me a long time. but I'm a city worker, so *shrug*

cutting jumpers to see who complains? nobody will complain, nobody knows what most of the stuff in that room does. at all. that's what they want me to figure out.

labels on the 66 block covers? you're kidding, right? there is a label on the block you can see in the 4th pic. on the outside of the orange cover it says "block to other side of building." (there's another "phone room" on the opposite end of the bulding that's just wires wires and more wires.)

the other 66 block between the demarc and the phone system has no labels. the only labels on anything that appear to make any sense at all is in the big screw terminal block, the jumper wires have paper labels attached to SOME of them....

the big block of screw terminals has probably been there since the building was put there by the city... in 1960-something. and you'd THINK that verizon would pull everything over to the 66 block to the right and that'd be where I do my work, right? naaaaa, verizon left the covers off the screw terminal for a reason... because that's where they've decided they're done. there's stuff wired directly from there to the phone system, stuff wired to 66 blocks, stuff wired to little krone blocks, and 1 that's wired to who knows what that goes up into a conduit and off somewhere into the building., somewhere.

and yes, the phone system IS still in use.... it's only... what? 25 years old? toshiba dk96... electronic phones... cards for 64 extensions. they know where 5 of them are, on this end of the building, and 8 on the other end of the building. between the 2 offices, they have 7 analog lines showing up. there's way more than 7 lines showing up in that big ole screw terminal.... they want me to try to make sense of it, get their other lines "hooked up" to the phone system (which appears to have 12 CO lines) it's gonna take me a few weeks (because it's not MY office, so I can only spend a couple hours at a time over there) to figure out what's going on and make sense of it.

some of ya'll have your hobby systems, your special projects... here's mine.

I dunno if I got a good shot of the floor in there... there's boxes and boxes and boxes of "stuff" spilling all over the place, too.

Did anybody notice the cans of 2 cycle engine oil on top of the big screw terminal block?

The screw terminal block is literally the end of thousands of feet of phone company cable. If you go poking around in there you will find numbers that dont belong to you or anyone in your building (or at least you could have back in the day when people still ordered pots)

To clean up that part you should just look around the room and see if the metal covers for it are sitting in the corner. It's not your property or concern really. The demarc is the 66 block and if your active numbers arent in there you can call the phone company and raise hell that you dont even have an rj11 jack to do your isolation testing at, much less tagged jumpers.

It would be faster to just get your butt set out and test all the jumpers you got between the terminal and 66 block, cut ones not in service and pull them, then pull that off any others that those jumpers were servicing.

Your phone room is pretty good tbqh. The 66 blocks with the building cable on them are particularly nice. Dont worry about any of them. If you're putting a phone in for someone's desk just find that cable, theres probably a Jack there already, put tone on it then find it on the building 66 block.

I just looked again, and yeah, the covers are right next to it. Just put them back on. You definitely need to call the phone company though. You need a nid with hi voltage protection, you dont seem to have any. I'm not familiar with that exact terminal, but I dont see any protectors at all, unless they are hiding beneath that metal steel panel below the screw posts.

You could get protectors for the 66 blocks but you shouldnt have to, the utility needs to give you protected lines. If I got it I'd just put up a bid or two big enough to cover your working lines and fill any holes in the terminal with fire. putty and make sure the ground is good.

It's because of the original orientation of the images.

You can always go to the original post in PHOTOS: Click Me and when you open the image on the bottom right is a rotation icon and click on the image to scroll through. That's the way to save from getting a muscle strain in your neck.

A bid or two -> a NID or two

In major metropolitan areas where lightning exposure is low, such as in NYC, DC, etc., Bell companies didn't install protected entrance terminals. In this particular installation, I think that they originally DID install 134 type protectors with dual 100 pair stubs when the place was built in the 60's. The incoming stubs were spliced in a fire-retardant splice closure (usually 20/21 type bolted aluminum ones) to the incoming cable. The output stubs were punched down on 66 blocks. There was probably enough space to accommodate about 600 pairs comfortably.

My guess here is that NYT needed to bring in more pairs and didn't have sufficient space in the "H chambers" already in place. Since protection really wasn't needed, they replaced the 134's with these 3M binding post terminals. These were often used to terminate house cable counts, but not as often for incoming facilities. The fact that the stubs are spliced in a Raychem/Tyco closure leads me to believe that this is a lot more recent than you think. Although it's not legal to use a non-fire retardant closure, who's enforcing the rules these days? Bell did their own code compliance, but they're long gone. No local electrical inspection agency is going to have a clue.

Wow, no posts since August,, things actually getting better out there?






No, no they aren't.

Just when you thought it was safe to peek into a phone room.

Looks like all of the extensions were home run and terminated in an extremely haphazard way.