In article , Gary Coffman says...

Note, if you have the old style ceramic block NIB, bitch to the phone
company and make them come out and install the new style (a larger
gray plastic box). The new style has *much* better surge protection,
and also has a modular plug so you can disconnect your house wiring
and plug a phone in there to test whether a problem is the phone
company's problem or your problem.

I seem to have two newer types of protection, both
the large gray plastic box outside the house, where
the drop wire comes in, and also a smaller, open gray
plastic square terminal board, about 1.5 inch square,
that has brass posts for wiring, and also some kind
of replaceable, threaded in studs that seem to be
either shunt or series protecion. Seem to be designed
to be replaceable.

Note that green should be somewhere between -7 and -48 volts with
respect to red (depending on your distance from the CO or SLIC, and
on whether the phone is on or off hook), and at some indeterminate
voltage with respect to ground. (Remember, ground is not part of the
phone signal circuit.)

The telephone company does a really good job of informing
the customer if there is any fault on their wiring inside
the house. They check for shunt leakages at the microamps
level, and it it goes above several, they put the line
into a fault condtion where the dial tone goes away.

I found this out when running some vintage phones, and
the dc blocking capacitor (western electric original
from the 30s) was a bit leaky. So there was a tiny
amount of dc going thru the ringer. But that was
enough to fault out the line.

The phone system uses negative voltage conventions, so the green
wire is considered the "hot" wire of the red/green pair. Neither red
nor green should be shorted to ground (a short would likely indicate
a failed surge protector in the NIB). Remember, ground is not part
of the phone signal circuit. It's there for lightning protection only.

As mentioned, some older systems used a third wire for ring
to ground, to obtain party line systems. With that, and
polarized ringing, they could run four customers off a single
pair.

One final note. While you're just running one line to hook up one phone
now, the slick way to wire a house for phone and network cabling is to
have a central wiring closet and use star topology, home runs from each
phone outlet to punch down blocks in the wiring closet, instead of just
daisy chaining the wire from outlet to outlet. It will be much easier to
troubleshoot, modify, or expand at a later date.

Do those 'punch down' terminals *really* work? I know the
phone company uses them all the time, but I wonder if the
consumer grade ones are as good as the good stuff. I've
been wiring using old open style electronics terminal blocks
(the ones with screws, and the raised dividers between
contacts) and crimp-on lugs.

Jim

==================================================
please reply to:
JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com
==================================================