Don't know if this is the correct place to post this but here goes.

Is it out of the norm to have dial tone of other customers at another customers inside DMARC. And the DMARC was extended by the service providor.

I have saw this time and time again. Where a customer will have many numbers that don't belong to them in there wiring closet. And not customers that are in a high rise or close to other people.

Looks like there would be privacy and fraud issues here.

No, not at all. I have buildings with multiple offices and specify that they fill one RJ-21X up first then install another. The only thing I require is that the numbers be grouped together and labeled. Sometimes I have to take care of this myself.

This saves me time and material because I install a 25 pair secondary protector fed with 25 pair cable from the Amphenol on the 21X. From there a 25 pair cable goes to a 66 block where the lines are cross connected to the risers or drops.

Sometimes we even have multiple tenants on the same KSU.

It's all one big cross connect anyway. The LEC terminal is often right next to our equipment. There you can find pairs from all over town, not just for that building.

We are not supposed to be in there but sometimes it'd necessary, and sometimes the terminal will be the DEMARC. This is where professionalism comes in. Do your job correctly and the LEC won't complain or even know you were there.

-Hal

Mr. VP:

Around here, it happens all the time, especially with RJ21's. FCC mandates that the customer's lines be terminated on a registered jack. The customer should be able to "plug" their 25 pair cable into the "jack" on the side of the RJ21X and have their lines (and only their lines) going to their equipment. Nobody ever followed that rule, they just pulled the clips and ran jumpers right from the block. The red plastic dust cover never came off of the "jack".

We don't really see many true RJ21's around here anymore. Usually, it's just a 66M1-50 with an orange cover. There's no way to plug in the cable as mandated by the FCC for an RJ21X. I think it's just become an unwritten rule that an orange cover on a block is an RJ21.

Here in the DC area, there are very congested closets, especially in the basement terminal rooms. Since the telco won't go beyond there anymore, that means LOTS of RJ21's in an area that wasn't sized for so many blocks when the building was designed.

Sometimes, it's just a lazy telco installer who didn't feel like going back out to the truck. Other times, it is a case where another customer has an RJ21 with five lines. While I agree that it is wrong to do so, I've seen them add a few lines to the block for a different customer because they know that the five lines are probably all that will ever be wired to the jack otherwise. The installers usually work the same areas and know the size of their previously-insalled customers to a certain extent.

New construction here usually includes real NID's with separate RJ11's for everything, regardless of the circuit type. That way, the line is formally drawn in the sand and there isn't a gray area for them to worry about.

As for the privacy question, I think that it's safe to assume that anyone with a butt set would tap onto others' lines regardless of who's jack it is.

This is just plain laziness on the part of the carrier. They are re-using cable pairs that once went to another location (yours), without going to that location and taking the termination off that use to be used at that location. This won't get corrected unless there is a trouble and they have to remove it...dang wire clipping anyway. :rolleyes:

Around here you don't see many real RJ-21X's with the 25 pair Amphenol anymore either. We like to use Krones which have the disconnect contacts. (I know these sometimes cause problems but in all the years I've seen them I can only think of maybe two instances.) I have the test adapter that splits the block in my tool pouch and it makes it real easy to determine on what side of the DEMARC the problem is just by plugging it in.

I guess you can say that this fulfills the RJ-21X requirement and apparently the LEC does too. I once got into a Sharpie pissing match with the LEC techs once. They labeled the orange cover on one of these Amphenol-less Krone blocks "RJ-21X" I wrote "is not a" above their writing. Next time I was out there my "is not a" is crossed out. This went on for years and I don't know who won. Probably when there was no more room on the cover.

-Hal

This is just plain laziness on the part of the carrier. They are re-using cable pairs that once went to another location (yours), without going to that location and taking the termination off that use to be used at that location. This won't get corrected unless there is a trouble and they have to remove it...dang wire clipping anyway.

Yeah, I'm usually pretty good with that. If I see a tenant has moved and the clips on the Krone or DEMARC are still cross connected I remove the cross connects even back to the terminal if it's in the room. Not unusual after awhile to find a working pair from down the street on it otherwise.

-Hal

But the ones I am talking about are customers that are not in locations where anyone else have ever shared incoming facilities with anyone.

Very remote customers in the middle of nowhere.

A new customer that the other nearest dial tone may be 1/2 mile away. :confused:

I had several customers all in a large industrial park complain about static everytime it rained. After a long battle Verizon found a DMARC at a closed business that had a roof leak over it. The whole industrial park ran through there.

Mike: It's not unual for cable count to multiple or over lap at many locations. A simple example would be the first complex from a CO might work out of a terminal that has a 900pr count to feed it (doesn't mean all 900 pr go into the building) and an office a couple miles away in the same cable count may have a terminal feed that has a count that falls with in the 900 count of the terminal on the first building so some phone tech takes a pair to run into the first terminal to fix a trouble that was really the count intended for the terminal miles away. Hope I made a little sense there.

But the ones I am talking about are customers that are not in locations where anyone else have ever shared incoming facilities with anyone.

Ah, OK. If you are indeed talking about a demarc on the customer's premises and not a terminal then somebody has dropped the ball and not disconnected the unused pairs on the drop cable at the terminal end.

As Justbill points out it is standard procedure for counts to overlap at different terminals which would mean that the same pair would be present at multiple terminals.

Only one terminal will serve the customer the pair was intended for. That pair would also be working at any other terminal where it was present and nothing should be connected to those binding posts.

If a drop was left connected to one of these working pairs obviously then you are going to have that line on the demarc.

So to answer your question now that I think I understand it, no there should not be any lines on the customer's demarc other than their own.

-Hal

Mike:

Now your question makes more sense. I thought you meant shared jacks on the same property. Now, when you mention cable multiples, that's a different story.

We actually were hired by the police department once to check a neighborhood for multiples on lines that were working at a house that was under surveillance for drug activity. They got a warrant to allow a third and independent party to check for appearances of their phone lines in other homes in the neighborhood. They knew the deals were being done over this phone number, but in order for it to hold up in court, they had to prove that this number ONLY worked at that particular address.

The warrant gave us (an interconnect) permission to enter telephone company-owned pedestals and cross-connect cabinets. I felt so powerful!

We inspected about 20 pedestals along several streets. The neighborhood was built in the 1970's using the "PIC or ready-access" concept where the same 200 pair cable looped through every pedestal. The installer simply picked a vacant pair at the cross-connect box and threw a tone on it. He then could grab this pair at any pedestal, splice on to it and voila. A second line for a customer.

The problem with this concept was that sometimes this pair might have been used at a different residence for a second line say ten years ago. The jack and inside wiring was still intact, still connected to that same cable pair. Many times, the "jack discovered behind the dresser" had dial tone on it, but it wasn't the right line.

Obviously, this PIC (or ready access) concept ended up being a bit of a disaster for the telcos. Most have gone to a fixed-count system, where pairs are dedicated from the cross-connect box to the terminal block in the pedestal. No more risk of multiples.

Oh, by the way, back to the CSI story. No, there were no multiples on the pairs feeding the house in question and yes, they had quite a drug operation going. We got paid $100.00 for our efforts (that was all they were authorized to spend while keeping it quiet). We didn't want any names getting out if you know what I mean. It was more of a fun thing.

Sorry to drift as usual, but back to your original question Mike. It is very common to have the same count in a cable appear in multiple locations. Telcos, especially in rural areas, don't have the luxury of providing dedicated pair counts to a building. A house on the side of highway 84 might be a shack that has only had one line for fifty years, but a renter comes in and orders 15 lines for a bookie operation. The telco isn't likely to trench in five miles of 25 pair to give them their lines. They will simply half-tap the emptiest binder in the 100 pair cable running down the road and place a 25 pair NID. The bookie gets his 12 lines, but rest assured, the other 13 NID positions have other peoples' lines on them. The bookie won't be there long, so the telco kept their plant investment to a minimum. This is a bit of an extreme in my example, but I hope it makes sense.

Multiple cable pair appearances have been around for decades. Telcos using computerized cable pair assignment programs might do a better job of keeping this to a minimum, but hey, it's all about money. A strip mall may have a requirement for a total of 25 lines, but they aren't going to make 25 available to every tenant. Those same 25 pairs run throughout the whole place and whoever needs the pairs gets them.

Everyone else just gets to listen!

Yea, Hal.

Thats what I am talking about.

You go into the customers wiring closet and there will be their lines then the lines of other people on their inside DMARC.

So your saying that should not happen?

Thanks,

If those lines are for another address, no they shouldn't be there on the demarc. If the telco located a terminal on the premises then there can be other lines on it.

Around here Verizon sometimes gets lazy and will not install an official demarc when their terminal is right there on the same wall.

-Hal

If there is a terminal in two buildings with the same dedicated or over lapping pair counts, at the rj21 there could be others numbers, but it should NOT leave the rj21. If the terminal is outside the building and the LEC is brings them into an inside demark a pair at a time (no dedicated count) than the answer is no as Hal and Ed said, the LEC should have removed them from the other locations prior to hooking up the new..again due to laziness a lot of times they don't.

Sorry Hal said the same thing you did.

Here in California, the Demarc is the Minimum Point of Entry (MPOE). If it is a building entrance terminal, it might be 25, 50 or 100 pairs, and there are going to be multiple appearances of other lines on them.

The SBS telco installer only has to tell you the binding post numbers that YOUR numbers are on, to complete HIS job. They trust that you won't connect to any others.

Verizon usually padlocks their terminals, and brings out the customer's numbers to a RJ-21 or a block that resembles the inside of an SNI, with the plug/jack disconnect and screw terminals.

Thanks fellows! :thumb:

The SBS telco installer only has to tell you the binding post numbers that YOUR numbers are on, to complete HIS job. They trust that you won't connect to any others.

I only wish Verizon had that policy. Certainly would cut down on the number of "locate and tag" requests when you can't locate a line in a closet or the Verizon installer forgets to identify it and there is no demarc.

Verizon usually padlocks their terminals, and brings out the customer's numbers to a RJ-21 or a block that resembles the inside of an SNI, with the plug/jack disconnect and screw terminals.

Naah, no padlocks around here unless someone pisses them off. Most of the stuff is either too old or not designed to be secured anyway. At most they will wrap a big lashing tie around it.

I hate those demarcs with the binding posts. They are designed for homeowners or DIY's, not someone who actually has to connect wiring to them for a living. Fortunately they are no bigger than 5 or 6 lines around here.

-Hal

Amen, Hal. Around here in the former GTE territories, there are actually walls of 100 Pair Siecor/Corning NIDS with every single stinkin' pair on an RJ11 test jack with screw terminals. You almost have to add another hour to the job because of course, your first three lines are on pairs 906, 925 and 971 in the first NID, your next one is on 844 in the second, and so on. By the time you get all 24 lines traced and connected, you've blown half a day!

Nobody locks them around here. And Bell very rarely tags or labels anything.

That's because they can get paid to go back again to mark it. The customer didn't request that the NID be marked when they placed the ohdah.

That's "order" to the professionals here.

Ran into a new one --- Keptel SNI with security screws/studs so you could not access the telco side. Most only had a can wrench to open. Some telcos used a funny tywrap to secure like a meter clip on electric meters.

KLD.

I'd get a ticket "hears others on line, test OK" or a customer would get billed for calls they didn't make. Pull the drop at the prem and and the heat coils at the CO, take a ballistics test with the KS meter, sure enough,there's a set out there. We called them floaters. Never quite sure what you were going to find-all of the above mentioned places and several more you PBX guys usually didn't go to, like trailer parks, housing tracts with RA terminals, etc. To answer the original question, if I found a drop or cross-connect on a customer's line that wasn't going to that customer's set it got removed.

Yes, but Denis, you were one of the few that cared. It's not like that these days with telcos as we all know. I seriously doubt that any technician (and I use that term loosely) from Verizon would even understand this topic. It's probably the same with all other telcos nationwide.

Hire cheap help.

Make more money.

More angry customers.

Doesn't matter. You have no competition and the local governments are afraid to confront you.

What a country. Looks like the only people who care is the handful of us here.

Oh, I dunno. We had a very helpful Verizon tech out to the Providence office a few months back.


The small basement under the front part of the office floods on a semi-regular basis. Conveniently, this is where some monster 3-phase electrical switchgear is located (former chicken slaughterhouse - the entire warehouse area was a walk-in cooler), plus a couple of NIDs housing the ten incoming lines.

The latest flood was a doozy, submerging the NIDs for the first time in memory. When the water subsided, the electric was repaired and Verizon came in to restore service. I arrived a few days later to replace the cable running to the phone system, and found there were some unfamiliar numbers present in the NIDs.

Long story long, the tech had noticed some faded Sharpie labeling on unused bonding posts, and had helpfully restored all of them! Of course, they belonged to other Verizon customers.

That's a keeper. :rofl:

where i used to work there was this mystery cable running down the center of the shop (i didnt do telecom at the time) the plant was about 1/4 km long. Anyways, the telecom guy one day was asked by facilities to remove the cable, he found a dial tone on 7 lines on the cable. He figured it was just lines that were never removed and got to thier owners premises by other means. The cable ended about 50 feet from the end of the plant and from there there were a couple of 4 pair cables comming out and going out of the building to a pole in the yard. On the pole they connected to MA bells wiring so our guy assumed the tone was comming from there. Anyways to the point. Our telecom guy cut the cable at the closet and pulled it out. The next day the phone company was knocking on our door, they found that the cable going through the plant was serving some small buisinesses in the industrial park behind the plant! when he cut the cable he knocked out thier telephone service. At some point the plant was widened and this cable which had been running on the outside of the plant became inside and thats where the confusion started