[asterisk-users] Dry Copper Pair

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Friday 11 May 2007 7:46 pm, Jon Pounder wrote:
> well actually there is dialtone on the unprovisioned pairs for the
> most part, but you can only dial repair, the telco office or 911 on
> them. I am not sure if its all pairs or just pairs that had a line
> provisioned at one time. ANAC just replys with some error message if
> you try to determine the phone number of the line.

If you're talking about for DSL use (i.e. connecting to a BAS and using resold 
DSL service) then yeah, there's almost always dialtone and you can only call 
the numbers listed.

Dry copper (two pairs cross-connected at the CO) has nothing on it.  No 
battery, nothing.  Loading coils will be present if one of the loops is 
exceptionally long, but otherwise it's just as if you'd run the copper 
between the locations yourself.

Where I was located (Listowel, Ontario) we seemed to get better speed vs 
distance compared to the equipment's ratings, but we chalked that up to 
having heavier gauge wire in the copper plant (small rural town) and thus 
less losses in the lines, not to mention possibly a lot fewer competing 
signals in the trunks.

> What I am talking about though is if you want to run dsl or some other
> highspeed type of thing or just an analog pair to a neighbour, or
> another office in the same neighbourhood, complex etc. All you do is
> put your tone generator on an empty pair at both locations trace down
> till you find them in the same F1/F2 box, and jump across them. (no
> connection to or through the CO, but only possible if both areas are
> served by the same F1 cable.) Around here at least, the worker who

Bell was HIGHLY adverse to this, as it played havoc with their planning, at 
least according to them.  We were only able to have them cross-connected at a 
pedestal in one (early on) loop; all others were REQUIRED to run through the 
CO, which often added too much distance for us to make it useful.

> F2 pairs, or even noticed it and cared, who would know ? Actually it
> would probably take some investigation to even tell if its a
> legitimate bridge tap or the left overs of one or just something that
> is not supposed to be there at all. In a world of if its not broke
> don't touch it, it would likely never get touched.

That's the other thing we ran into from time to time: bridge taps.  Loops that 
should have gotten an easy 1.5meg wouldn't sync at all, and eventually the 
culprit was found to be a 5km tap run off to some new subdivision.

-A.