Outside Plant Show & Tell

As you drive around your community you will find telecommunications equipment on the side of the road and over your head on telephone poles. You may have equipment in your back or front yard that you are curious about.

Although fiber optic circuits are the latest and greatest, most of our calls are still transmitted on copper wires from your home or office back towards the Central Office for some distance. The Central Office is a building where all cables in a geographic area connect to a switch. These cables and equipment are known as Outside Plant.

I’ll do a little Show and Tell in this and future posts. If you would like to get more information on something you have seen, use my contact page to ask me.

This is a picture of a terminal attached to a telephone pole. A terminal can be defined as: a point at which a telephone line ends, or is connected to other circuits of a network. In this case, this terminal is used to connect wires from an office or home to the network.

If you look closely you can see a small cable coming up from the ground in the middle of the pole to the terminal. This terminal is "fed" from buried cable. To the left of that cable are two smaller black cables. These come from the terminal and go to buildings on the other side of the fence. These are known as Buried Service Wires.

The next picture shows what is inside. It is a simple device with screw lugs to attach the buried service wires. It's capacity is 25 circuits; two wires a piece.

The reason this terminal is exposed is that it is located in Florida where the ground water table is fairly close to the surface. Buried terminals are used but it would be a water tight version. This method of placement is effective and very accessible to technicians.