We have been working on a lot oa paper cables lately. One can tell that there was some color coding of wires, though it is faded and possibly not readable any more. Also I have been told that the installers ignored the colors, and I can believe it, because in straight splices the in and out pair does not usually have the same colors.

But I am still curious if there was a defined code, and what it was intended to be. Does anybody know?

Also, the same question for pulp cable, though I have never seen any pulp cable.

We have also seen some odd count pic, I appended to another topic on that score.

Paper had the same colour code as Pulp. Bill will pipe in here. He's our resident splicing expert.

Dave

Only the core, or start group and the spares had distinctive colors. You just splice group for group and tone out the ends, or if it cut into pic. To get the groups correct you started at the core group (the differnt colored group in the layer) and count counter clockwise towards the CO and clockwise to the field (the customers always right) There was no pair color code.

and what are the sizes of the groups? And cables, for that matter? Similar or the same as odd count pic?

I'll have to look more closely, but I thought I had seen several combinations, e.g. red/white, blue/white, green/white, maybe combinations like red/green. The colors, are quite faded, so I wasn't sure if I saw blue or slate

And some with stripes (maybe the stripes were the spairs, I don't recall many of them).

Large pulp cable was in 100pr groups, I don't remember the number of spare in each group, but I believe it was two. If I remember right paper wasn't so rigid as far as number of pairs in a group. It's been a long time since I've worked with either so this is all memory work. I don't remember either paper or pulp having more than one pair color in the group, other than the spares. Largest pulp I remember was 3600pr. Paper I really don't remember, but not near as big as the pulp.

The pairs having one color code were in groups of 50 pairs. The green/white group in any ring is the first group of that ring or layer. Then, as JustBill has said, the next 50 pairs would be to the right (clockwise) looking out, and to the left (CCW) looking back to the C.O. The rest of the groups would be Blue/w, Orange/w, and Red/w.

The largest that I ever worked on was 2700 pairs, but they came much larger, up to 3600, I think.

The extra pairs were put in for maintenance reasons, and they were assigned odd color combinations that would not normally appear in a standard group. Examples would be Y/Bk, R/Bl, W/Bk, etc. These were put in at a rate of one spare per 100 pairs, and when splicing the cables in a manhole, they were spliced through, color for color. They were called "intersticial" pairs, because when they were exposed, they resembled the nerve interstices of the brain, lying as they did between the 50-pair groups.

There was a later PIC version, called BUPP cable, that had groups of 50 pairs, each comprised of 2, 25-pair binders. Each 50-pair group had only a yellow binder around it, (except the first group of 50 which had a green binder) and therefore the cable pairs were not actually coded, beyond the 1 through 25 code, times 2, over and over. The groups were counted as above, with the green-bound group as the first group, and the splicing operation was the same: 50 pairs at a time, but not random, because of the color-coded pairs.

It was confusing when encountering this type of cable for the first time.

We had a customer out of service for 24 hours last week, one of the contractors hit a 1200 pair lead and paper cable. It took from midnight to midnight to splice. Now that I look I'm not sure they have it correct yet...

Last paper cable that was cut here they were using tracer tones to tone it out, which didn't work great so they have to short each pair to verify it was correct. Not real efficent.