On Aug 27, 10:26*am, "David L. Martel" wrote:
Andy,

* *My phone box was installed by the phone company, Verizon**. It is not near
the electrical service box. It has it's own ground rod.

Dave M.

**Not Bell standard then!

Am very surprised. The various grounds are normally 'bonded' together.
In our case the power neutral is grounded as it enters the house and
has a ground rod. Also the TV cable service and the telephone
protector are grounded/bonded to the same ground. We have also taken
care to bond our ground to a buried copper wire loop that sits in the
trench above the now abandoned one inch plastic pipe to our unused
well.
Many years ago our neighbour, had a bad leak to ground from his
electrical system. Since our systems were all bonded together we had
no problems; but he had some weird voltages floating around the
grounds in his house until he cleared the problem! It was a buried
entrance to his house that had 'gone bad'.
The soil resistivity here is high; so driving a single ground rod is
often not suitable. Hence most electrical systems now use MGN (Multi
Grounded Neutral). This means that except in the case of certain very
high voltage line guy wires everything that is 'ground' should be
bonded together and grounded. This includes overhead transformer
grounds, telephone and cable TV sheaths, pole line guy wires,
telephone sparklightning protectors etc. etc.