atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Outside Plant OSP Construction Dropped Drops.

Was out walking not too far from home when I saw a street was partially blocked off. As I approached I noticed that an overhead Verizon cable had been snagged.

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I think you can see the pairs in the first picture. Verizon was on the scene when I was walking back home.

Yeah, around here if it was just in front of the house and not blocking traffic they would just tie some yellow caution tape on it and fix it maybe next year. In the street like that they would just tie a rope to it tied to anything above to get it high enough so traffic can pass. Hey, we're busy you know.

-Hal

Kinda looks like a new cable will need to be run from the splice to the mid-point then across the street to the building.

Search for 6 Mill Street Arlington Mass to see the before picture.

The image from Google Earth street view makes it look like the drops is an accident waiting to drop...so much so that apparently Telco has a bucket truck just circling the block waiting.

Verizon was parked and waiting in the last picture. Not sure if the truck in this photo is Verizon.

Verizon repaired the drops. They look to be about the same height as before. Interesting side note: I picked up some discarded wires up off the ground below the repairs. Looking at the wires, I see a few solid white and some solid colors. I can't discern stripes on any of the pieces. Is that common....to have solid color tips & solid color rings?

I remember the first time I opened a piece of cable and found all solid colors. Somewhat terrifying. Yeah it was common. If the pairs aren't twisted together well you're in deep trouble. When you open the cable the first thing you have to do is tape off the end. Then strip off enough insulation to give yourself plenty of room to work with and trace. Then you identify the binders. Tape them off individually and mark them. When you've got all that done, THEN you can start working.

Sam

Most GTE* Telco drops around here were solid White and solid Orange.








*Great Telephone Experiment

I suspect that things would have been so much easier had the cable manufacturers marked OSP copper insulation in a similar fashion as inside copper. Although having seen the insulation on some CAT5 and higher cables....the blue & green pairs as well as the orange and brown pairs look very similar.

The worse I ever used was the old translucent jacketed Category 3 Teflon...smeared colors and had more kinks than Pee Wee Herman.

That sounds like my experience with Commscope's CAT3 4 pair cable.

Old Systimax 4 pair CAT3 had traditional insulation.

Today, Commscope's CAT3 4 pair is CAT5 that didn't meet specs. Commscope labels and sells the cable as CAT3. The insulation is translucent and can be difficult to, correctly, identify the pairs.

Dean, someone gave me a box of cat5 with that translucent teflon insulation. I used it to wire a friends house for ethernet and phones. It was indeed a pain in the butt, but it worked and it was free.

Paul, I've seen a bunch of OSP in my travels and it all has been solid colors with no tracers. I have a large chunk of something like 300 pair that someone gave me and while I have the binders separated and the pairs grouped at one end, it still gives me a headache to look at it. It's not long enough to do anything with so I keep it just to show off to people.

The real fun stuff is the lead pulp cable. I have a short chunk of that and the paper is white and pink (probably was supposed to be red) and that's all you have. I think I posted a picture of it once. I found it in the basement of the bar I do maintenance for. The building was originally fed with pulp cable but has long since been redone with regular plastic stuff and a fancy 100pr protector/terminal. I'd love to cut out one of the lead splice cases and open it up to get some pictures. There's three or four lead splices down there where they tapped off the main cable to feed terminals.

Osp cables usually arent striped. They are twisted together though so it's usually no doubt what the pair is.

Twisting aside, is there a reason why striping isn't found on OSP cables? Split pairs was one of the major reasons for trouble tickets being opened with Verizon over my 23 years as a CLEC/IXC Central Office technician.

Price is at a premium per foot. Any extra step in the manufacturing process is big money when they are placing 5000 ft of 1200 pair cable. I've only seen split pairs on drops and once out of a x connect box. Both cases are guys trying to avoid fixing a resistance fault. It's really never been a problem splicing for me. It's always the repair guys.

Also I think we got two cos around here that's got a couple hundred feet of split pairs because everything has bad lb and minor noise despite having good resistance and voltage.

They used to have only yellow/black plastic cable too. Paper isnt uusually a problem losing pairs, it's much worse about unravelling the paper. Some of these splices you almost cant touch without tuning them.

The reason for non-band marked cable pairs has to do with a few things. First, polyethylene insulation really can't have another color applied to it. It won't stick. Second, the reason they use polyethylene insulation is that it can be much thinner than traditional PVC, which helps to reduce the overall diameter of the cable. By this same logic, believe it or not, the thickness of the colored stripes or bands will actually increase the diameter of the cable as well when you're talking about hundreds of pairs. It's all about keeping the cable as small as possible to reduce weight, labor costs and most importantly, maintaining a maximum outside diameter of 3.75" so that it can be pulled into 4" ducts.

Kinda makes me glad that I didn't have to work on OSP copper.