sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring "quad" phone wire

I know that this is not really a 1A2 question, but I do not really know where else to put it. Sorry in advance!

I was wondering if anyone still makes the 18 gauge 'quad' telephone wire with the gray jacket. I remember that when the phone man came to install an extension, that they took their time doing the work, did a first rate job cleaned up any mess they made and always used this heavy, gray quad wire with the red-green-yellow-black. I also remember one such installer telling me that the yellow-black pair was used mostly in residences for powering the light in princess phones.

Wouldn't this wire be too large a guage to punch in a connecting block? Or did Ma Bell only use this particular wire with screw terminals? If this is still made, does anyone know where to find it? Google was not my friend when I looked for it...

Just curious.

Thanks,

Joe

The largest gauge quad I recall is 20 gauge. You can still get 22 gauge quad wire from about any distributor.

Hello, Joe.....greetings from Leavenworth to the BB and have fun....

Security distributors will sell you the traditional unpaired quad station wire and in many colors besides beige and gray.

Today the quad we use (Superior-Essex comes to mind) in the telecom industry is paired- The rd/gn pair is twisted as is to bk/yl to minimize crosstalk. It's actually CAT3. That is because we use the wire for two POTS lines, not one line and voltage to light the lamp in a Princess phone.

So if you should come across a crosstalk problem someday check to see if somebody used a run of old quad for the two lines.

-Hal

The terminals on a 66 block will accept up to 22 G wire.

This is common with quad wire. I only use it where I absolutely have to. Mainly on residential outside runs due to it's UV tolerance.

Well as I remember back in the dark ages, we used to use red black for 1st t/r and yellow/green for the 2nd to stop x talk.

If you were to look carefully at a cross-section of the quad, you would see that there is no advantage to doing that; in fact, you will get MORE crosstalk that way.

The wires are, by definition, a twisted quad, not two twisted pairs. Therefore, there will always be the potential for crosstalk, but it will be limited if you use the opposing wire combinations (Red/Green & Yellow/Black) the way the wire was designed to be used, rather than trying to uninvent the wheel, by using adjacent wires as pairs.

The limitations of using the quad configuration for two CO lines start to manifest themselves after 100 feet or so.

Ditto that. Arthur is once again on the $.

Back in the day I was putting in a lot of OKI Discovery III PBXs. Usually the station gear was either 1A2 or SLTs. On one job I had a number of 2 person offices each having 2, 2 line phones, each phone run with quad - Line 1 on R/G and Line 2 on B/Y. The shorter runs to the MDF worked fine the longer runs had crosstalk.

I resolved the problem by running 1 line on each quad and then running a short quad jumper between the two 42A blocks (with both lines on it). That took care of the crosstalk.

Sam