Re: How could a landline be re-routed?

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney-99@hot-mail-com>]

> Actually the pair from your home to the CO is a collection of pairs
> connected to one another. Pair from house to street cable connected at
> pole or underground pedestal. The street cable is connected to a larger
> cable that runs along a major street and so on to create a single pair
> back to the CO. Of course, that's the old fashoned way. Now you are
> likely to be connected to a fibre concentrator well before hitting the
> CO.

Yes, but there'd still be ONE pair for the POTS line leading from your house
to the nearest piece of equipment.  Once upon a time that would have been
the central office.  Yes, you'd be pulling one pair up to the pole (possible
inside a multi-pair overhead line).  From there it'd probably get spliced
into a multi-pair cable.  Possibly again when that cable lead underground to
a larger bundle going back to the central office.  Binding post charts
detail all of this.  There are all sorts of ways the pairs can get screwed
up.

> >> Your line  could have been assigned a pair that was not dead at the
> >> other end.
> >
> > Um, what?  Of course it's /supposed to/ be a single pair for the
> > line.  At least in most set ups.  What are you talking about here?
>
> What I mean is this:  Let's say that I live at 123 Maple St. and you
> live at 234 Maple St. There is a 100 pair cable serving the street. I
> have a phone number that comes to me on pair 57 of that cable but I have
> it disconnected because I'm happy using just my cellphone now.  You
> order a new line from the telco. They assign your number to what is now
> a vacant pair on that cable, pair 57. The installer connects your drop
> cable to pair 57 at the pedestal and voila, you have phone service.  If
> I leave my old dead phone plugged in and the installer doesn't stop at
> my place to disconnect my drop from pair 57 then I too have your new
> phone number working at my place.  This happens far more often than the
> telcos will admit.  It is a real problem in office buildings.  I can't
> tell you how often I've found other companies lines appearing in a suite
> that isn't theirs.

Ah, then you're talking about incompetence on the part of the worker (who
may or may not be an 'employee' of the telco).  I've certainly seen plenty
of situations where an office building had distribution points throughout
the building that had pairs from other businesses running through it.  Not
since the days of Centrex handselt have I seen the wrong lines ringing at
handsets.  Now most lines run into PBX equipment of one sort of another.
It'd be odd to have both the pairs setup wrong AND the PBX configured to use
the wrong trunks.  Not impossible, but a lot less likely than in the past.

The message posted wasn't really clear on what was actually happening, or
even when.