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.

Introduction

With the advent of the Internet, email, cell phones, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other forms of electronic communication, the term “telecommunications” means something different than it did 30 years ago. It used to mean what the telephone could do. Recently I asked a retired college professor—now working in a library—where I might find books on telecommunications. He directed me to the marketing section. I asked another and he assumed I meant the Internet only. It’s really all of these things. But what is the foundation on which they all depend?

During my thirty seven year career in the telephony I saw constant change. But some things changed very little. The changes came in speed and use of the network. This required equipment updates and changes in who had direct access to the network. The idea of allowing a competitor access to a switch was unheard of until governmental demands required old Ma Bell to open her doors. What stayed the same was the need to use physical connections to create the network.

This blog is for the curious but non-technical person who wants to know more about the telecommunication network and its confusing parts. It is also for people in the telecommunications industry that need or want simple explanations for areas they may not work in directly. I hope my descriptions give you an appreciation of the network that makes your communication devices work. It is not intended to be a technical blog (there are plenty of those), but to explain to the average person the network and its parts.

The next several posts will be extracts from my essay; Simplyfying the Complex World of the Telecommunications Network, which was written about this network in the United States. This essay was offered in a Telecom group in LinkedIn. It made its way to people working in this industry in more than 36 countries around the world. It was obvious that there was some demand for simple explanations and some history of this network. With some help from my contacts around the world , I hope to include some history of the network development in those countries. I will be happy to accept any data that is offered.