A recent call for help from a new customer revealed once again that transitioning the legions of small businesses from legacy gear using the PSTN isn’t going to be a matter of FCC debate and rulemaking. Instead, hundreds of thousands of businesses are operating mostly unaware of their telephone futures being jeopardized, even compromised, by the Telcos bailing out of maintaining aging copper infrastructures.
The greater threat isn’t so much policy making, but rather a lack of understanding of the policy makers and those that chant for the death of both legacy gear and the PSTN. While there is no magic bullet capable of resolving the interconnection of customer premises hardware, there are vast inventories of solutions to help customers transition over to IP networks so long as they have adequate and reliable bandwidth.
In several of my posts discussing the site survey, what I haven’t mentioned is that in a general sense of using the “site survey” as a means to properly assess and evaluate a network, the same tool or methodology can be used when visiting any customer site. Although the process is brief and not as intensive, field technicians can learn to do an overall evaluation and walk-through both to gain familiarity of the customer premises and to spot potential issues. This knowledge is not obtained by an analytics tool that performs a network assessment.
In this case, the neatly installed Nortel system and the clean demarc is what I’d call a really nice installation on the surface. A glaring issue is the cooler on the floor used to get the UPS off the concrete floor. The blue cooler shown in the first photo below is dirty for a reason – not shown is the rest of the floor covered with water.
The issue here is that the UPS or any UPS of this genre doesn’t fare well in any wet environment. This building is an old tenant house on a farm that was converted to a small office. The (well water) pressure tank is installed too closely to the telephone system. This simply wasn’t a good choice, since it impedes access to the telephone gear and power panel.
We determined that the “noise on the line” was due to a bad wire pair; the cable itself is an indoor PVC Cat5 drop used from the inside (demarc) to the outside network interface device. Once again, any cable will work but the question is how well and for how long. Luckily, the cable was trimmed back several feet and the cable pair was restored with a splice until we can return and install an outdoor cable to the Network Interface Device (NID).
Using the wrong type of cable (indoor wire) for an outside application is common. While this seems small and insignificant, it isn’t, because we often see the same erroneous installations on both fiber and feeders that are exposed to inside/outside and plenum ceilings. The cable type used must match all environmental concerns. This cable isn’t in a plenum space, but it does need to be outdoor-rated to ensure that service isn’t interrupted.
The defective cable pair isn’t surprising. It could be easily dismissed as water penetrating the sheath of an indoor piece of wire. The third cable pair was previously snipped off at the 110 blocks on the plywood. Someone did this for a reason – being that this pair had gone defective. Again it could be water penetrating the cable--but looking further (see Photo 2 below), the real culprit is more likely power damage (transients).
The second photo below shows cross-connect wire connected to the ground lug of Porta-Systems protection modules. This wire gauge is 26AWG, and someone not only committed an act of stupidity, but also had a blatant and gross misunderstanding of grounding and power protection. Telephone cross-connect wire is never acceptable to act as a ground for Transient Voltage Surge Suppression (TVSS) or Surge Protection Devices (SPD). Many building entrance terminals and protection modules use a 6 AWG or 8 AWG ground wire.
The protection system is only as good as the grounding. As shown in the third photo, the telephone cross-connect wire disappears into the power panel where it is grounded.
Of the many TDM systems that I’ve touched from numerous manufacturers, I’ve always taken my hat off to Nortel (Northern Telecom) for their gear’s ability to withstand surges and transients in spite of installer stupidity. The guilty party obviously thinks that using both conductors doubles up the ground wire, but in reality it does little to properly protect the customer site.
These issues are more common than you think, and the many others that routinely plague small businesses are sure to dampen the quest for an all-IP-network. More importantly, those providing hosted and IP on-premises services need to learn from the physical installation mistakes. And once again, too much dependency on network assessment without the skin put into the onsite physical inspection will likely come back to haunt you later.
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