Re: Phone Line Interfacing - FCC Part-68


rickman wrote:

On May 27, 3:37 am, "Michael A. Terrell" <mike.terr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
rickman wrote:

In urban areas, it is *not* the same right of way. A phone company
may have right of way for the poles, but that does not give them the
right to dig up and bury lines. But the real issue is money. It is
very expensive to take out equipment and bury it.

Beleive whatever you want. In some places the conversion is cheaper
than constant repairs, and onlp bean counters can't see this.

Please don't be insulting. It is not a matter of belief. It is a
matter of fact.


Sorry, but the facts are that you are way out of date on the
technology. You are stuck in the '60s, or even earlier.


You can do an incredible amount of repairs to equipment before
it becomes cheaper than wholesale replacement and burying.


Not when usable equipment can be salvaged and used for repairs at
other sites that aren't growing, or growing as fast. I can see that you
don't see the big picture. Do you have any idea what it costs to run a
fleet of service trucks? Or how many more you need, if you have to
support multiple obsolete technologies? The extra labor costs, because
your repair efforts are ineffective?

Florida Power found that out the hard way after the last round of
hurricanes hit Central Florida. At least a dozen different types of
fusing and switching equipment were still in use, so the people brought
in from other parts of the state, and outside contractors spent more
time finding the right parts, than doing repairs. The 60 A 7200 line
feeding my street was repaired, then it took another 24+ hours to locate
a fuse for it, because almost all of that style had been used.
Different sections used different equipment and under normal
circumstances, trucks & crews were assigned to service an area that had
only one or two types of equipment. Not only did it cost a lot more to
restore everyone's power, but people who had no power for two weeks or
more didn't say, "Well, since you are such nice guys, we'll pay for a
normal month even though we barely had electric for a week." If the
equipment was standardized, they would have to warehouse less spare
parts, have fewer trucks on the road, less line crews and make the
dispatch office a lot more efficient.


Have you ever run a component level repair department for a major
communications corporation, with physical plants in a dozen states and
almost 100 cities? Sometimes a system gets all new equipment just so
the old equipment can be tested and shipped to other plants for spares.
I did that with commercial grade C-band microwave equipment, so the
oddball equipment could be replaced with the same brand and model as all
the others at those sites. All defective equipment was sent to my office
where I either repaired it, or parted it out to keep other equipment
working. Some of the local managers didn't like it, but it saved us a
couple million dollars in four years.

For instance: Rockwell/Collins wanted $1500 for the stud mounted
bipolar microwave transistor used in the 4 GHz LO, and told us that we
had to buy them ten at a time. then wait up to 14 months for enough
orders to accumulate before they tested and shipped a batch. They
wanted everything shipped to their repair depot, and required you to
rent a loaner for $150 a month, and the average turn around on repairs
was a little over six months. I started repairing them in house, some in
under 15 minutes from the time they failed. they hadn't even cooled off
before the bad parts were replaced, the flux cleaned from the PC boards,
and they were stuck on the spares shelf in the head end.

I could buy brand new Microdyne 1100 LPR receivers which were drop in
replacements for $1200. They had a better noise figure, used less AC,
and generated about 10% of the waste heat. Seven of thirteen of the
Rockwell/Collins receivers were shipped to me with the promise that if
we couldn't fix the five they needed within two weeks they could have
any new equipment on the market. I got them that Friday, and shipped
six back on the following Monday. I scrapped, and used the others to
repair over 20 other units that failed. Average cost to repair was
under $50 each. In four years over 10,000 pieces of CATV, industrial
computer (Character generators & terminals) and test equipment went
through my shop, where under 1% was scrapped, but a lot was transferred
from one system to another as upgrades were done.


I think I already said that they did that here in a part of
town, not because it would save any money, because the city paid for
it in order to improve the looks of the downtown. The phone and power
companies would have *never* done it on their own because of the
enormous cost of tearing up sidewalk and burying lines.


Did you ever see early overhead phone lines? Have you ever heard of
"Phantom Circuits"?
<http://www.middletownlibrary.org:8080/cgi-bin/viewer.exe?CISOROOT=/Crout&CISOPTR=1502&CISORESTMP=&CISOVIEWTMP=>
This is what was used before they were scrapped for the lead covered
cables. This is another time they scrapped something that worked, for
newer and cheaper technology.


Why do you think they strung the lines in the first place,
because it is so cheap to do it that way.


The lines were overhead because the early lead & paper covered trunk
lines were not suitable for underground installs. Even overhead, they
caused problems. A pinhole would let water in and cause crosstalk
between pairs, or even worse, migrate through the early plastic and
cause electrolysis. that is why you see the large bottles of dry
nitrogen used to pressurize lines and keep any moisture out of any
possible leak.

Add the fact that not every house on the block had a phone, and they
went with the cheapest possible technology. In some places, only one or
two houses on the block had a telephone. That thinking included a
terminal block that was inside a splice housing on the overhead cable.
When I was a kid, there was one or two per block, and that old hard
rubber covered steel drop wire could run to the other end of the block
before being dropped between 'P' hooks. It doesn't make sense to keep
patching aging and failing plant, no matter what business you are in.
Otherwise no one would replace old delivery trucks, they would still use
mechanical cash registers, and you would still have to use a rotary dial
to call the operator to place a call. Why do you think they created
direct dialing? The equipment work, and the switchboards didn't need
much maintenance. They scrapped that system to go to the stepper or
crossbar central office so they could eliminate most of the operators.
The same thing happened with the ESS Electronic Central Office. It was
smaller, had some diagnostics built in, and didn't require the same
skills that repairing or cleaning contacts in a mechanical C.O. The
mechanical exchange in Middletown Ohio was built out of parts designed
60 years earlier, and there were no new spares. It was pieced and
patched together with salvage from old C.O.s that were being torn down.
They said it would be another ten years before they replaced that crap
with ESS. Then their biggest customer told them they had exactly one
year to fix everything, or they were going private with their 10,000
numbers. here is a picture, before they grew to require that many phone
numbers:

<http://www.middletownlibrary.org:8080/cgi-bin/viewer.exe?CISOROOT=/Crout&CISOPTR=2299&CISORESTMP=&CISOVIEWTMP=>


A lot of small phone companies refused to do anything, till they
reached the point they couldn't afford to do anything and ended up
selling out to a bigger company, rather that spend time fighting the
PUCO over customer complaints.


I have no idea why you say,"everyone shares on copper".


All the copper lines here had up to 16 phone numbers per pair.


If you are on copper, you typically have a connection directly
to the switching office.


That was the old 'DC pair' concept and was no longer available in
some areas 30 years ago. A line card multiplexes the customers. and
another card at the CO breaks it back into an equal number of subscriber
lines. Call your phone company and tell them you 'DEMAND" a DC pair and
prepare to be cursed at, or laughed at for being a fool. I used to have
two way radio customers, with remote heads on leased lines, and a local
fire department that used a leased line to control a siren at a paper
mill a mile away. All of them had to be converted to RF links or tone
signaling equipment when Ohio Bell eliminated all DC pairs. The fire
department was easy. The county already had a 'Plectron' selective tone
control system to be able to set off any fire or civil defense siren, as
needed. We simply put an antenna at the paper mill and moved that
receiver to the paper mill. The radio systems could still get a
dedicated connection, but it was not a DC pair. We had to use Motorola
tone squelch reed relays on some systems, and others required major
modifications. Even the city police and county sheriff's radio systems
had to be converted, there were no exceptions to the new technology.

The process started right after Ohio Bell finished their conversion
from a mechanical to an ESS C.O. They ripped up all the sidewalks in
downtown Middletown and burred concrete conduits, then started replacing
all the overhead lead cable.



That is why they call it "copper". Anything else requires
conversions from A to D and back to A. In my case the A-D-A is done
between me and the CO. Then it is digitized again in the ISPs modem,
but the levels have already been quantized and they don't line up with
the modem's levels. So they can't use the V.90 technology and the
rate is much lower..

At least you have it. DSL is only something I hear about... a lot!

I have yet to see good performance from DSL, compared to cable. Some
is barely 128k, and my cable is a little over 7m most days.

We really aren't communicating. I don't care how slow DSL is compared
to cable. It is absurdly faster than dialup and lame dialup at that!
Around here DSL is 512 and higher for most folks. Of course that
varies with your distance from the CO. But at some distance they just
won't give you DSL because of the speed problems.


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