[Tfug] CAT5 Cables, The Sequel

[George Cohn]

Bexley Hall wrote:

> IIRC, on pay telephones, ages ago, you could ground
> one of the yel-blk pair to get a dial tone.  But,
> that may just have been on the "out in the sticks"
> exchanges where I lived (dunno, its been many years
> since I did any phreaking)

Actually pay phones were central office trunks.  They were "ground 
start" IE: you placed a ground on the ring side IIRC to initiate dial 
tone.  Many of the old pay phones in the UA dorms had loose transmitter 
caps because you could unscrew them, remove the transmitter capsule, and 
ground it's contacts to get dial tone for a local call.

> 
> Have a 50' length of 25 pair you can part with?  :>
> (need to run all the pairs from one set of punch-down
> blocks to another set on the other side of the house)
>  

I'll look but I don't think so.  I don't work for my old employer any 
more but I can ask the next time their voice engineer calls for a 
"consultation," I'll make that my fee.  ;-)

>> loops.  Where I used to work, we had a dual
>> redundant OC-48 (2.5 gig) 
>> Sonet ring backbone between three facilities in
>> Tucson.  Even that is 
>> relatively slow now, especially when you are sending
>> digital images all over the network.
> 
> All that free porn!  :>
> 

Not me but a couple of IT guys got escorted to the door for getting 
caught doing it.

>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OC-192
>>
>> Sorry to ramble on and get OT, my 3+ decades of
>> working in the telco and IT industries made me
>> do it!  ;-)
> 
> I think, nowadays, folks see everything as it was
> ALWAYS that way.  I can recall arguing with friends
> about the virtues of having to dial "1" to call
> "out of town"  :<
> 

Remember when in-state calls were 1 + number and it was only when you 
needed to dial another state that the area code was required?

About 20 years ago, they ran out of the 600 or so area codes and had to 
go to the NNX format to get thousands more.  N = 2 through 9. X = 0 
through 9.  Before that it was N (0 or 1) X.

Trivia, the area codes with 0 as the middle digit were the first ones 
issued.  Then they went to 1 as the middle digit for the second area 
code within the same area.  That's also why the carriers now have 
1010XXX codes because they ran out of ones like 10288 (ATT long distance).

George Cohn