sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Demarc Cabling

I have what to me seems like a simple problem but trying to deal with At&t has made this simple problem extremely complicated and expensive.

Basically we purchased a building the demarc was taking off the wall all the equipment(smart circuits etc) were left there just on the floor. The Wiring is still in the ceiling looks to be a 50 pair wire. We want to remove this wiring but the wire is still live and there is voltage running through it. After about 2 week being transferred around At&T finally got to the local engineers office, but they said it is going to cost at least $2500 to disconnect it from power so we can pull the wire from the building. To me this seems kind of ridiculous. Any one ever been in the same situation and have any advice

Thanks in advance

James

Power? Is this a telephone feed cable or an electrical cable?

Rcaman

Its a phone cable from the smart jacks left behind looks like maybe they had a DS3 or maybe even higher capacity all copper though. The building used to be a count room for a casino so you can imagine the kind of bandwith they would need to remotely access the amount of cameras they had. I can see where it runs out of our building to the At&T underground post. The engineer said it could have upwards of 100 volts running through. When we tried to move it originally (We thought it was dead) it started smoking

It's true. Once upon a time, telcos sent special services circuits to a shelf that was locally AC powered. This wasn't ideal, since if the power went out, these circuits would drop too. In some instances, they didn't come back up automatically when power was restored. In addition, these circuits were usually pretty important, so clean and consistent power became a must.

The best way to provide this stability is to power the cards in the shelf through line power from the central office. The CO's power never fails due to huge battery banks and generators. The problem with this method is overcoming the voltage drop due to long distances between the CO and the customer's premises. In order to compensate for this, the voltage used is often 100 volts DC or more. While the voltage may be high, the current is fairly low, so it isn't likely that it will kill you or start a fire, but it is no fun to encounter by accident.

Thanks for the info Ed. Must be real uncommon because everyone At&T sent to look at it seemed baffled. I think my best course of action without having to spend thousands of dollars is to pull the wire as far out of the building as possible where the end of the wire is still in the building then cap all the wires with wire nuts or terminate them to a 66 block and throw that in some kind of junction box and hide it in the ceiling

Is it possible to cut off any exposed conductors so that all 50 pairs are flush with the outer jacket, tape off the end of the cable, backfeed it to the point of entry, coil...tag...and secure it above the ceiling so that it will be available in the future if needed?

Actually, it is quite to the contrary. At least in this area, Verizon ONLY uses line-powered interfaces for special services circuits. AC powered shelves are all but abandoned.