POTS line quality help

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was only analog modems and nice paper manuals came with them. Some of those manuals, in the back discussed that for best use, one should order a specific quality of phone line and disclosed the BELLCO designation to use when ordering the line. As i remember it, that designation was something simple like (making this up) Z9. I think that the TekCom modem manual at that time was one that gave that info. Question: What is that designation? Thanks.

Reply to
Robert Baer
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Cat 3 is commonly used for high quality telephone wiring.

POTS is expected to go the way of the dinosaur within the next decade. I'm ditching it as soon as my Internet gets a bit faster. New homes are wired with Cat 6 so the phone jacks may carry gigabit ethernet later.

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Reply to
Kevin McMurtrie

By 2019? I'd put money that -- unless there's a huge government program similar to the REA -- there are many people in rural areas who are still going to have POTS *well* past 2019.

Maybe by 2029 though...

That being said... at the Oregon Caves national monument not far from me here, some vandals cut their POTS lines (that had been in place for decades) last year. They found it more cost effective to set up a high-speed digital microwave link rather than repairing the POTS line damage -- which gives them more phone lines than they had before, as well as fast Internet access. (Interestingly, they have a really cool lodge pole-style resort there that purposely doesn't have TVs in the guest rooms... yet they had a little booth available for a phone-line hookup for dial-up Internet access back around the turn of the century; I used in back in 2002. Kinda odd that you could check your e-mail but not watch the nightly news on TV!)

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

You're late. I haven't used POTS for six years. I do wish my Internet connection was from this century, however.

Reply to
krw

In the following article about Century-Tel buying Qwest they mention US POTS usage shrinking at 10% per year. I think this is a little on the low side but in any case your decade number is probably close. However, I do not know if any of the cable companies provide, or have the reliability level to provide, life line service like POTS.

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Joe Chisolm
Marble Falls, Tx.
Reply to
Joe Chisolm

The cost of maintaining rural overhead lines is quite high. In Finland, some operators have been actively dismounting rural overhead wires. Unfortunately this also makes it impossible to get ADSL broadband connections and the population in those rural areas have to live with not so good wireless Internet connections.

Reply to
Paul Keinanen

Ma Bell did not use Cat 3; there was no such thing in those daze and their designation of (POTS since that is all that existed then) their lines was (as i indicated) rather simple (and different).

Reply to
Robert Baer

THAT is a rather interesting and amusing story!

Reply to
Robert Baer

Ma didn't, but pop often wired his house with Cat 3. Now all that stuff is so cheap there isn't any reason not to use a single pair of Cat 6s for home-run telephone wiring.

Reply to
krw

So...i should buy about 20 miles of Cat 3 to run from the house to the CO? And make all the phone company, police, etc allow _that_??

Reply to
Robert Baer

That was *not* the point made.

Reply to
krw

so

The "point" is that you apparently do not know what you are talking about; i ask about bell designation for phone line quality and you mumble about Cat 3; not related in the slightest degree.

Reply to
Robert Baer

so

You obviously can't read either.

Reply to
krw

The last i heard you wanted a 3002 line. Should be able to provide 56k on typical current modems.

Reply to
JosephKK

You didn't originally mention that you wanted to know about utility pole wiring. From what I've seen there is no standard cabling. Check some old poles where the wiring has been cut and moved. The cable build probably varies every block.

Maybe you're thinking of fancy wiring that was used for long distance calls before they were converted to digital signals.

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Reply to
Kevin McMurtrie

THANK YOU!!!!! I will see if that works here with Qwest in as much as they are rather customer hostile; they only want money and care less about anything else. You make a call and find the line busy; an *automated* voice prompts "for _only_ eightyfive cents we will try your call for later delivery" (price something like that) Never Mind that it _costs_ them NOTHING to do this; it is a way of extracting money from captive customers. I could cite a fair number of other examples like the phone line problem i have. Up to about 6 months ago (roughly) i could reliably connect at 45K to

48+Kbaud and then all of a sudden i got 28.8Kbaud and now am at 26.4K and who knows how more it will sink? The have been actively pushing DSL like crazy (3-5 inserts in monthly bills, newspaper ads, etc) and PURPOSELY choking modem bandwidth to "force" a change in $pending (= = ca$h to them). Too bad the internet does not connect by way of semaphore flags...
Reply to
Robert Baer

Correct; i made no mention or even allusion regarding utility pole wiring or even phone line wiring in general. As far as i am concerned, that is not relevant as even in the early

1980s, one could use a modem to communicate up to 28Kbaud if you had the money for those rather expensive (then) modems; all one had to do "extra" is to ask for a line selected for data service by way of their unique designation (T-1?). As communication technology improved and costs went down, one could (theoretically AND advertised) go to 56Kbaud (or was the lie "to 58K"). But some kind of stupid BS, that advertised rate was available on only ONE direction, a (slightly, sort of) slower rate in the other direction. I would not be surprised to learn, that in phone companies lust for money coupled with their UN-care for customers that NOBODY in the continental US can use POTS even at 33Kbaud.
Reply to
Robert Baer

I do not what US advertisement claimed, but 56k technology assumed that the only analog path was the path between the phone office and the customer. The phone office produced 256 signal levels at 64 kbits/s and the end user modem had to determine which of these levels was actually transmitted.

This required an A/D converter with more than 8 bits. The problem is much worse than this due to the A/u-law floating point format used in telephones, so in practice more than 12 bit linear ADCs are required in the downlink direction.

In the uplink direction, there is no way that an phone office 8 bit A/D converter would be able to handle much more than 32k.

Reply to
Paul Keinanen

Hmm..maybe that was the reason for non-symmetrical communication rates; roughly 50K uplink and 56K downlink. Still....that is a damn sight more than the 28.8K i was getting up to last week and i would settle for the "original" 48.8K throttled speed.

Reply to
Robert Baer

Sounds like they added a line to your neighborhood and stole part of your circuit (that they never promised you). You might see if you can find someone in the telephone company who can look up your circuit to see what happened.

Reply to
krw

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