Originally posted by justbill:
I think the spare was only in odd pic. I don't remember the color code we know now as having a spare, and I spliced a lot of it.
I worked Step and GTD-5 switchrooms from 81-88ish, and most of the cable used inside had a spare pair. They needed every pair of every cable to work, when you hook up a 100-line linefinder or connector group you want all 100 lines good, so that spare came in handy.
And when I went outside to OSP Construction Splicing from 88-93 all the old paper cable had a spare pair for every 100-pair binder - the one red-blue pair. And we had Pulp and Single-wrap "Firecracker Paper" to deal with - just breathe on it wrong, and it would unravel and make a shiner.
On PIC cables it varied, but you'd get one spare pair for every 300 to 600 pair, depending on what they felt like tossing in. They didn't give you one per hundred group, because the incidence of bad pairs went down a lot with plastic insulation.
When you got into customer premises wiring, that's where they stopped supplying spare pairs. - it was never loaded 100% and always easy enough to just swing the line to an extra pair, and tag the bad pair at each end.
--<< Bruce >>--
