[snip]
I haven't found anything with those particular instructions (which were real ones)., but have found 3 items all of which say "for 1, 2, or 3 lines:"
6-conductor wire (red/green/yellow/black/blue/white): Philips UL/CMX round wire (there's no part number on this spool, maybe it came off with the customer annoyance device)6P6C plugs: Ideal 85-345
6P6C wall plate with F-connector: Philips PH60627
You, kind sir, are mistaken.
The yellow/black pair in the old "light olive green D-Station Wire" was most certainly - and commonly - used to provide a second line within the same cable (along side the red/green pair). This is true whether in a residential or commercial application.
This practice was enumerated in the BSPs (Bell System Practice)s.
A telco will - and does - work on such a two-line arrangement to this day. It's "legal", proper and [ta da!] works just fine.
The OP read your words just fine. They were wrong.
In 1960's era houses they often used three conductor cable, and the yellow wire was for lighted phone dials, via a transformer. Then they went to four wire cable, with the red and green for the primary line, and black and yellow for the secondary line. Often they'd install multiple RJ11 jacks with only the inner pair used for each line, but often they'd hook the black and yellow to the outer contacts, and the red and green to the inner contacts.
You can often find two line phones that connect with a single cable, pinned out that way.
Actually, the ownership of inside station wiring was transferred to the property owner shortly after Divestiture: January 1, 1984.
...and it was NOT a blessing for at least 7-8 years.
Shortly after it became legal for non-telco personnel to install inside wiring, every electrical contractor forced their employees to install wire that was made improperly (no twist).
It was a mess: Non-standard (crosstalk) wire installed by those that were MAD because they felt forced to add it to their existing job - and they felt it was NOT their job. They were not privy to the politics of Divestiture.
The confidence with which you write belies your expertise; rather, your LACK of it.
Inside (deregulated) wiring is still done today, EVERY day, by telco employees - not just contractors.
Just what *IS* "digital" wiring?
I respectfully disagree.
Particularly with DSL, data-rated cable (Cat 5e, etc) is NOT required.
Think about it: The DSL signal is delivered to the end user over as much as 3-4 MILES of non-data-rated cable that was made before DSL was even thought of. It makes no sense to attach Cat 5e wire when its fed with (probably) "Cat 2-1/2" cable.
Data-rated, twisted pair cable is required for high-speed networks - not the POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) system. And DSL - ALL "flavors" of it - are delivered over the POTS network.
Nice wire but unnecessary for DSL (phone line-to-the-modem).
Not bad as long as the pair is good. In fact, DSL will operate, albeit more slowly, on a faulted pair on just ONE conductor (the other being OPEN.)
Nope. You can deliver a reliable DSL signal to the modem using well insulated bailing wire. Of course, I would avoid running that hack near any motors, ballasts or other working pairs.
That is otherwise known as shielded cable. It, too, is overkill on the POTS side of things - DSL included.
There sure is a lot of half and misinformation here. Sheesh!
Since 1984, ALL telephone services (read: ALL) have had a demarc - a DEMARCATION point.
That was - and still is - usually the Minimum Point of Presence or Penetration (MPOP).
Services installed or upgraded since about 1986 were done using a Standard Network Interface Device (SNI or NID).
Remember the difference between a demarc and SNI/D.
When a premise visit is made, and no SNI/D is present, one is SUPPOSED to be installed, at no extra charge to the customer, at that time.
Of course, if the weather is crappy, the work load is heavy, the installer/repairdroid is in a bad mood or Jupiter is not in alignment with Mars, the retrofit may be deferred.
I am not sure that there is an OFFICIAL requiring entity (FCC, whatever?) but I believe it is official PRACTICE of all telcos.
Old? ARGH!! :)
Listen, Sonny-boy: I UPGRADED many a protector from the old carbon block protectors to the "new" gas tube variety. And the new stuff is NO better than the old carbon blocks.
The "protector" (within the SNI/D if present) is not to provide "first-level" surge protection. Instead, it is to keep your house from burning down in the event of a near-direct lightning strike. Even the modern stuff passes-through MOST transients. If it didn't, a phone company would have HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of service call in the hours after every thunder storm. No way.
Again, please remember the DISTINCT difference between a "demarc" and a SNI/D.
In a grandfathered situation (one with no SNI/D), the telco responsibility extends INTO the premise (residential, commercial and industrial) to - and including - the protector block.
Most installations have the protection within a few feet of the service entrance. Those that extend great distances through the building BEFORE being protected are rare. In those cases, an upgrade would include installing the SNI/D at the entrance, thereby deregulating the rest of the formerly telco-owned cable that extends through the building to the former (divested) demarc. At that point, the protection is either removed or disabled in favor of that provided at the entrance and new SNI/D.
Aw, he can cite ME. I did it for >30 years.
RJ11 RJ14 RJ21X RJ31 RJ45 Yadda Yadda
Don't believe anything you read and only half of what you see. (Will Rogers. )
I read it on the net so it MUST be true.
Situation:
40-year-old home wired with four conductor "JK" wire. (red/green & yellow/black)Customer wants a second POTS line in his home office.
The telco installer connects the new line to the yellow/black pair of the quad wire at the demarc/SNI/D.
At the "far end", if the yellow/black pair is not already connected to the formerly-one-line block, the installer has two choices, either one will be dictated by the customer's need.
If the customer has a two-line telephone and wishes both lines to be delivered from the wall outlet (jack) to the phone on a SINGLE base cord, it must be a two-line cord - four conductors.
Wired thusly, the jack is configured as an RJ14. It's the SAME jack (four pins) but the outer, two pins have been activated with Line 2.
If the customer wishes the new line to be a stand-alone line, the installer will ADD a jack/RJ11. Red/green will feed one and yellow/black the other.
I did it so often I could do it in my sleep. Some unfriendly coworkers would argue that I occasionally did.
Where do you GET this info? Man...
White/blue is the color of Pair 1 - yes - the FIRST pair, in any cable. Mere single-family homes since about the late sixties were wired with such cable. Such cable is readily available at Home Depot and Lowes.
The white/blue pair is connected to the green/red lugs on a common block (jack/outlet). White/orange (line/pair 2) is connected to the black/yellow lugs on the same jack.
Aw, we have pure blue here, too. ...in the sky.
Mostly, yes.
The fourth conductor, to make a second PAIR, was added by the Bell System many, MANY years ago to facilitate either dial light current, a spare pair in the event of failure of the first, or the need for a second line.
Dial light transformers were introduced in the late 50s or early 60s to illuminate the lamps inside the (then) new Princess telephone. The Trimline phone followed shortly with an illuminated dial.
When dial light became "line powered", it was no longer necessary for a dedicated transformer somewhere in the house - the ORIGINAL wall wart.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of such transformers still in service today - virtually unused.
Multi-party service did NOT use "filtered ringers". I don't believe such a thing ever existed.
On two-party service, the ringing current is sent down one "side" or the other of the serving pair. At the station, the phone's ringer was connected to either the ring or tip side of the pair and the other side to ground. As mentioned earlier here, most station wiring was, for DECADES, three conductor. The third conductor was to provide a ground for partyline use.
A private line-wired set, "illegally" connected to a 2FR, would ring for ALL calls because its ringer was wired ACROSS the pair instead of as I described above.
Really OLD, multi-party installations? That was even more complicated.
A 4FR (four parties on the same cable pair): One party on the ring side was assigned a LONG ring, the other party was assigned two, short rings.
The same held true for the two parties whose phone ringers were wired to the TIP side of the pair.
This way, the phones would ring for only TWO parties of the four.
Then there's six and eight-party service. It's just more of the same with either three or four parties on one side of the pair and the others wired to the other side of the pair.
Then they got into different ring patterns such as we call today Custom or Distinctive Ringing: [long]; [short]; [short short]; [short long short]; [long short long]; and so on.
In other words, with eight parties (with properly wired telephones) on a single pair, only FOUR would hear the ringing of partymates.
I missed those days by a decade or two. I didn't miss much, methinks.
They did, and still do. Sorry.
Probably intercom or thermostat wire. Given the source is Radio Shaft(sic), the former is likely.
Hehehehehe! I miss talking to those that REMEMBER "real" phones!
Your second line on the yellow/black is right on. BTDT.
Yeah? Well the center pins on an ethernet card (in a computer) are shorted, for whatever THAT's worth.
Back in the dial-up days, I lost count of the times I would clear a hard short trouble report by removing the RJ11 plug from the ethernet port in the back of the computer and reconnect it into the nearby, internal modem IN port.
In this day and age who is using party lines? and if so every party line users phone has different selective ring tone? So how many different phones do we need then? My working days I never heard such thing. This phone is for Joesa', this phone is Smiths, so on and on?
Hmmm, You mean there are some dumbs who can see the difference between RJ11 and RJ45?
I have 2 lines here and the few old sections of the original wiring from the 60s had terrible crosstalk when you used both lines at the same time. That really became obvious when you had a modem on one of the lines. I ended up rewiring the whole cludge with twisted pair to stop it
Um. I didn't describe an R-11 jack at all, dunderhead. We are talking about the WIRES. You also seem to think that the princess phones used the yellow/black pair for lighting. That's essentially incorrect in terms of this discussion, and you don/'t even know that much. The princess phone used the yellow and black wires IN THE PHONE forlighting power, but the wall connector was actually an adapter configured as a shunt to prevent those wires from connecting to the yello/black wiring in the wal, so it could still be used for that second phone line in the kids rooml. Those wires, IN THE PHONE were passed to a wall wart for power, and had ZERO to do with the telco wiring in the wall.
Forget pins, pinhead. We are talking about house wiring for telephones, not termination.
Only in the case of phone to wall cords that come packed with very cheap phones, will you see 2 wire cables. Not germane to the discussion at all. Google "red herring" for further information.
Yet that is EXACTLY what Telco's have done for decades to create a second line for the kids bedroom upstairs using the existing wiring. They don't homerun new wiring through a hosue for that, as it would be almost as stupid as you.
Then why do you keep posting it?
Very few, I'm sure.
I suspect that most remaining multi-party lines in service belong to independent telcos and, even then, the stations are probably far away from the Central Office (farm lines, etc).
Not during the remaining years of my career. In fact, in "my" exchange (local call but just outside Omaha, Nebraska), there were only a handful of 2FRs and they were eliminated a few years before I retired.
The distinctive ringing I described was used mostly (exclusively?) in manual (non-dial) exchanges. It was the Operator, manually pushing the ringback key on her switchboard, that made the patterned ring.
Keep in mind this is some VERY old history. I am not sure that any automatic (but non-ESS) Central Office was capable of custom ringing. By then, however, most partyline arrangements had been reduced to TWO parties - and even they were "bridged" in the Central Office for convenience.
Just one: The Western Electric 500 (for example) ringer could be wired for Tip service or Ring service.
In a properly wired situation, given two-party service, neither party would hear ringing if the call was for their partymate. Not so with
4FR, 6FR and 8FR. It was the distinctive ring pattern on one side of the pair that informed the parties as for whom the call was intended.That is correct.
In later days, as cable infrastructure caught up with and even exceeded the demand, 4FR, 6FR and 8FR services were regraded to two-party service and were bridged in the Central Office.
Diehard, remaining two-party subscribers were asked occasionally to regrade to private service. Some did, others hung on to the cheaper service. Here's where the devious "fun" began...
As two-party service faded, there were many 2FR-class subscribers bridged ALONE - they had NO partymate. Their partymate had either regraded to private service or had simply disconnected their service.
Those that hung on to their 2FR service did so, in part, because they "saw" (heard) NO reason to switch: They hadn't had to share their line with anyone in YEARS.
After canvassing the remaining 2FR subscribers in an exchange, the telco would REASSIGN a partymate to the remaining, formerly bridged alone subscribers.
Having to share a line again, most of these diehard 2FR subscribers would finally regrade to a private line. "Measured Service" would provide them with the same, lower price as their former partyline service but on a private line.
Oh, yeah. :\\
For whatever reason, the customer unplugged the phone cord from the computer's internal modem IN port. Then, probably fumbling around in back where it's dark and without a good, solid view, they inserted the plug into the ethernet port.
An RJ11 plug fits nicely into the 8-pin (usually ethernet) RJ45 jack. Doing so places a short across the center pins of the phone cord and, thusly, across the pair, effectively "killing" the phone line. Simply unplugging the phone cord from the ethernet port/jack removed the short and restored the customer's dialtone.
Really? So telling them that the only 2 wires they need to hook up their phone are the red and green ones was incorrect? You are beyond stupid.
Bwhaahahahahahahahahahahaha!
They need to come up with a new word for "ignornace" to cover you. "ignorance" just doesn't cover it.
No doubt.
It's pretty simple: If there is crosstalk, the cable is made wrong.
Western Electric's old, light-olive gray D-Station wire (quad wire) would NOT crosstalk even though it had very little twist. The red and green conductors were across from - not NEXT to - each other. Likewise for the yellow and black conductors. They were stacked like this if viewed as a cross section:
red - black green - yellow
This configuration prevented POTS crosstalk. The introduction of Touchtone and, later, dial-up modems, created some cross, but it was usually only audible if the CUMULATIVE length of the quad was great.
Following divestiture, the big cable manufacturers (Rome, Cerro, General, etc) saw a potentially huge, untapped market. They all jumped on their looms and began cranking out UNTWISTED cable.
They never bothered to inquire of Western Electric or the incumbent telcos as to how we got 300 people on a 400 pair cable yet they never heard one another (crosstalk).
There was a period of about 7-8 years after Divestiture where virtually all new construction was done with garbage wire.
This situation wasn't discovered by the homeowner until they added a second line - right about the time that dial-up internet was coming on strong. Suddenly, they reported HOOL (Hears Others On Line). It didn't take long for us to figure out what was going on.
Heck, for the last twenty years of my career, I installed and maintained the service to a true MANSION. It is a gated estate complete with gargoyles and all the toys. During construction, the place was independently wired with about two bucks-worth of crosstalk quad!!
Of course, this was insufficient from about day one as the owner (a VERY successful businessman) peaked at about 5 lines and one FX (foreign exchange) line. He also added a four-wire, high-speed data setup years before there was DSL.
I installed two, multi-line SNIs on the outside of the huge home and we "walked away" from the garbage wire inside. Independent phone contractors dealt with the inside from that day on.
My favorite encounter there in later years was the independently installed 6-pair station in the third-floor "cupola" room centered in the middle of the roof - an island in the roof.
The "technician" bored a hole through a window sill, shoved out the wire, climbed onto the roof and proceed with the installation. When done, the 6-pair INSIDE cable lay across the sloped roof and ran down the INSIDE of the downspout! At the bottom, the installer bored a hole in the elbow near the SNIs, fished out the wire and connected it. I never did learn how long that hack lasted. Not long, I'm sure.
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