atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring My rat's nest at home (pictures of course)

So this is my rat's nest at home. The first picture is how it was tucked up by that ground wire.

The second picture is what it says on it. I'm assuming it's not just a splitter though. Can anyone confirm?

Third picture is another picture of that mess.

Fourth picture is how it actually comes in. Unfortunately, I'm not yet in a house. I live in an attached condo. The wall that that cable is coming in on is actually between my neighbor and I, and not an exterior wall.

So, the questions that I have (and the pictures may not show enough clearly), is it worth trying to neaten that mess up? Ideally, I'd like to put up a board on the wall and perhaps punch thing down and whatnot. I don't know if it's worth it. But, either way, that doesn't look like a demarc point, and I'm not sure that that's even going through to my neighbors unit. I also suspect it may be part of the cabling for the entire unit and that the jacks are daisy chained.

The only thing I know for sure is that the jack to that ADSL splitter is easily traceable, as it is in the basement as well, where I used to have my "data center". I don't have DSL any longer, so that splitter isn't even necessary.

What do you guys think? It drives me nuts, but we only plan on being in there no longer than another couple of years, so I could live with it if I wanted to.

Be careful here. They probably looped a 12 pair between the condo units and you may interrupt service to your neighbors.

That's why I'm thinking it might not be worth it to bother. It'd be one thing if it was a detached condo.

I may check with my neighbor and see if she'll let me in her basement to see if there's anything coming out on her side.

That looks like typical Bell 6 pair prewiring from the late 1960's or early 1970's where the cable looped through every outlet in the house. Both ends were brought back to the protector because:

1. If the cable got cut, it would still work since it was being fed from both ends;

2. It allowed the loop to be cut, thus providing twelve usable pairs.

It really would be a good idea to double-check and make sure that nobody else's dial tone is working on the other pairs as Rusty Nails mentioned.

To clean it up, I'd just punch each cable down on either side of a 66M1-50 block and place bridge clips across the working pairs.

Agreed. Thanks rusty nails and Ed! I'm definitely going to check on it before I do anything. It seems to me that when I was replacing the jack in our room there were way too many pairs than what was really needed in there. I'll have to check again to be on the safe side though.

yeah here in montreal we have cables like that vertically in appartment buildings, you remove a jack in the kitchen and get all your upper and lower neighbors DT

If I was you I would leave it alone.

-Hal

Very good chance I will be doing precisely that.

It looks like a DSL splitter module for a NID. Usually you would have one set of wires going to the modem, one set going to the protector, and one set going to the rest of the phones in the house. It looks there there is a red and green wire that comes out and is spliced in somewhere, can't really tell by the picture.

I'll try to remember to get some more pictures tonight. I'm very curious. I know the jack in the basement was solely used for the DSL router.