sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Is a new apartment building legally required to have phone wiring?

Topic sums it up. I am working with a developer who is building a new student apartment complex. He currently manages several other student apartments in town. In the existing buildings resident landline usage is very low – one building has less than 10 lines for over 600 residents, one building has no active landlines for approx 200 residents. It seems most students are content with their cell phones or possibly the VOIP offering from the Internet service provider.

Now for the new building, the question on the table is whether it is worth it to wire phone jacks in addition to the CATV/data jacks in each room.

First question: Does the owner have any legal requirements to wire the units for analog phone service? In other words, does a resident of an apartment have a legal right to phone service specifically from the local phone company (AT&T)? Maybe for 911 service? ADA requirements?

BTW, the building itself will have Bell lines for elevator phone and fire alarms, per city code. Plus a phone line for the pedestrian entry gates.

Now the second question: If there is no legal requirement for phone lines, what reasons can anyone offer up for putting them in anyway? Current usage is fairly dismal and so far everything that I have come up with has been shot down.

The pedestrian gates on existing buildings work fine with cell phones, so we don’t need phones for that. AT&T DSL or U-Verse IPTV isn’t compelling, as every resident gets free Internet and CATV anyway.

Anyway I would like to hear any thoughts on the subject.

If this were my building, I'd have the wiring installed now, before the walls are closed.

Eventually, someone is going to want a REAL phone line for whatever reason, and I believe at that point the owner cannot stop him. Therefore, if the wiring in non-existant, the local Telco will running the wiring on the surface. After awhile you're going to have one heck of a mess.

My word of advice....DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME

To my knowledge stupidity has no legal requirements.

While the group you're serving is tethered to their cell phones, with internet supplied, who's to say that will always be? If your pulling in CATV and data you're already paying for the labor the cost of adding phone cabling is minimal. I think a bit of logic comes to play here.

I couldn't agree more. Remember how everything was going wireless in the 80's, even desktop phones? Remember how quickly that idea fizzled out? Remember the first two roll outs of VOIP and how miserably they failed? Just because today's fad is cell phones, who is to say that's going to last forever?

One of the proposed changes in the 2008 National Electrical Code was to require at least one wired telephone outlet in all new residential construction. Unfortunately, that idea was rejected. With that being said, I don't see the NEC as having any authority on this. I would think that it would all revolve around local codes if anything.

I am sure it would vary from state to state but I am not aware that even electricity is legally mandated. As far as I know the only thing absolutely required for human occupation is the usual building codes for what you choose to put in and a mandated functioning sewer system. In California that is 1 toilet per 10 people. Pretty loose standard. You could build a whole complex off the grid if you wanted to. Coveniences like water and power sure make it more attractive to tenants, though.

But not installing phone wiring is a huge mistake. Going to cost the owner a lot of money to retro domestic construction with TELCO. Dirt cheap relative to the cost of the whole project when done during initial construction. Cheaper than anything else in the whole project to be sure.

This kind of budget cutting is for fools.

I think here in California the CPUC mandates that it is the landlords responsibility to provide 1 working phone jack. If there were no IW to begin with, it might get expensive to have it done when the time comes; if the landlord is ever called on it.

I assume that there is a licensed architect or "design professional" involved? Has that person presented any electrical drawings to the owner/developer/GC? Are the low-voltage outlets that are specifically for telephone called out on the "E" drawings? I doubt any architect, regardless of his/her age or opinion of landlines would risk designing a building with no landline capability.

I can see the headlines now:

Entire cell system taken down by hackers.

Those with landlines continue to make emergency medical and fire calls for their neighbors.

Next-of-kin plan class-action lawsuit against landlord, builder, electrician, city.

Sounds like this is being designed by the Millenium Generation for the Millenium Generation. They can't remember the past because they haven't any yet.

At any rate I certainly remember 911 when the entire cell system went down for a long time. A tornado came through here a few years ago and it went down again. Lesson to be learned is that the reliability is not there in times of emergency.

-Hal

Thanks to all of you for your replies. Just for the record, this building is still in the planning stage and this was just a budgeting conversation. Still eliminating a bad idea is best done early in the process! I am posting an except below of my summary of the issue.

Thanks again to all of you for your feedback.

Nicely worded.

Has there been any discussion about providing optical fibers to each apartment?

I think at a minimum you at least pull in the extra wire and leave it unterminated behind the woa. The reality is you need to be a sells person here, why, because it really doesn't matter if the wire is pulled in now or stapled in latter. The bottom line is his pocket and you need to learn how to pick it; honestly.

Exactly. What if the owner decides to sell the property to someone that wants to turn the complex into a Senior Citizen's complex years from now?

I would imagine it could be a deal breaker if there were no telephone outlets.

We discussed it, but the distances to each apartment from the wiring closets are short enough to be well within Ethernet range. So the plan is for a fiber feed to the building with Ethernet direct to the rooms. The ISP supplying the fiber also supplies the switching equipment for the building and can cap individual connections. The base connection, which is free for tenants, is 3 Mbit. Residents can then pay for upgrades up to 20 Mbit.

Also the ISP is also paying for the Ethernet wiring and the CATV provider is paying for the coax wiring. That's how the discussion of phone wiring got started.

Best answer so far! I have no idea why "contractors" try to save a few bucks by not installing proper ammounts of copper wire.

I realize that this is an old post but, I was reading over the NEC 2008 code, that will go into effect 1/2009 for many AHJs. There is a new section in article 800 that addresses your application.

800.156 Dwelling Unit Communications Outlet. For new construction, a minimum of one communications outlet shall be installed within the dwelling and cabled to the service provider demarcation point.

We install catv/data/phone wiring for a local college. They very seldom use the voice wiring we install because the students have cell phones. They had two providers install equipment to boost the cell signal in all the dorms. They tell us to keep installing the voice wiring for liability issues. If something would happen and all the student had was a cell phone that went dead. The college has the wiring for a land line had the student wanted it when they moved in.

Our campus still installs cat 3 everywhere for phones including residence halls. Hardly anyone uses their room phones but the connections are still there.

I am installing a voip emergency phone system at a college here in newport news. One phone for every classroom (+1 wireless line per class) and in all hallways.In their new droms there is cat5e for voice cabling and 2 cat6 cables for voip and data. This gives the student the option.

Edit: This post assumes your talking about a higher education owned dorm, not a unaffiliated 3rd party landlord that caters to students.

Someone might argue that TDD over IP, such as https://www.ip-relay.com/myiprelay.html makes landline relay services obsolete. The US government actually pays for these IP relay services.

I can't say whether IP relay can be a substitute for landline relay service under ADA. IANAL but I'll provide what I see as some relevant quotes.

https://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm#9.3.2
this is in the residential section of the ADA standards, sounds like you can get away with giving someone VOIP for TDD or telling them to use IP relay or not giving phone service of any kind at all (left to AHJ to mandate it if they want to) or ATA VOIP+ TTY at your own risk. If you think about an all IP/eth building and convergence, it makes no sense to have a landline anywhere. Might be an monopoly service contract banning the ILEC on the property. Converged buildings are starting to be the norm anyways. VOIP and an ATA are the right way to go for the owner to deliver phone serivce if he must (assuming no AHJ requirement). Since this is a dorm and there might be no legal tenent/landlord relationship, or more of a "In loco parentis" relationship between university and student regardless of age depending on state laws. There seem to be no requirements for ILEC POTS reliability in ADA, or a requirement for a phone of any kind, looks to me like "if it exists, its regulated", but IANAL. If a phone isn't accessible to non-disabled, why does it need to be accessible to the disabled? The spirit of the ADA is to let the disabled experiance everything that a non-disabled can, not to go above and beyond what is available to the non-disabled.

There is a more detailed section for equivelent technologies for TTYs here .

IP Relay is probably not equivelent, but an ATA is link .

Remember municipal AND state educational commissions AHJs can be involved in a higher education dorm. Architect should be complying. Also municipal treatment of dorms vs MDUs might be very different, and dorms may have very relaxed or tightened regulations compared to MDUs. Dorms might follow SRO hotel, monastic life, boarding house, industrial space or commercial space regulations, not residential.

off topic/not phone related/ranting (mods please remove if not acceptable):
Please speak to the HVAC people. I've seen a circa-2002 glass box dorm from hell in a jurisdiction applying a code that was written for 19th century monasteries and poorhouses being used for dorms . Bathrooms are 3 doors from nearest openable window, no mechanical ventilation anywhere in the suite. A freshman thought nothing of cleaning the bathroom with bleach the first time he was given the chore. For 2 months the people in that suite had to use their neighbor's suite's bathroom and the public bathroom on 1st floor, it felt like tear gas in seconds of me stepping in that bleached bathroom by accident. Temperature control is horrible. The building uses forced air liquid radiators (no local heat pumps) piped in series from room to room. Whole building is a single mode (heat/cool). Only control students have is by hoping the fan control pad will respond to them at the moment. All radiators are individually addressable by a central controller. It can do any permutation of allowing user control, setting min/max temp range, read current room temp on unit, force fan on or off locking out all user control, and manipulate zone valves. I guess this is in a futile "habitable space" or temperature enforcement or energy savings, central controller's behavior seems absolutely arbitrary to me, and it feels like big brother when the keypad is locked out. The radiator's air intake recycles air from that room, no ventilation function. Only mechanical ventilation in the building is the 2 grilles per floor in the hallway for the emergency smoke exhaust system and the clothes driers in the basement Building overheats in winter (80F), underheated in fall (55 F), undercooled in spring (77F), overcooled in summer (60F). School has a no electric space heater policy enforced by RAs. AHJ requires 1 "operable" window per bed containing room, but no minimum size. For anti-vandalism reasons (hanging banners from windows down the side of the building), the school chose casement windows that only open 2 inches until they hit the non-removable bug screen mounted over the openable window. The would not be compliant at all in a normal MDU in the municipality. The dorms are so empty (almost no 3rd/4th years or masters students), some floors are rented to other universities in the area. I wonder why