Re: How could a landline be re-routed?

["BruceR" <razrbruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Bill Kearney wrote:
>> 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.

If it were a small business they may just have a key system instead of a
PBX, the difference being that the CO lines for a key system appear on
the phones.
>
> The message posted wasn't really clear on what was actually
> happening, or even when.