Telephone Power  & CATV Poles

Background

2024 Jan: New web page The End of AT&T Land Lines.

Feature Table

	HV AC	Tel/DSL	CATV/ Broadband	Comments
Fig 1	yes	yes
Fig 2	yes	yes
Fig 3	yes	yes	yes	Fiber
Fig 4	yes	yes
Fig 5	yes	yes		1ph 3wire
Fig 6	yes			60kV
Fig 7	yes	yes
Fig 8	yes	yes	yes
Fig 9	yes	yes	yes	BTN-M node
Fig 10	yes			Fiber
Fig 11	yes	yes	yes	DSLAM X-box Fiber
Fig 12	yes			Cap bank Fiber
Fig 13	yes	yes	yes	BTN-M node CATV info
Fig 14	yes	yes		my pole
Fig 15	yes	yes		my DSL
Fig 16		yes		my DSL
Fig 17	yes	yes		my underground
Fig 18		yes		my NID
Fig 19	yes			outdoor electric panel
Fig 20		yes		loading coils
Fig 21	yes			69kV power tower
Fig 22	yes			Pwr Two close up
Fig 23		yes		tel boxes
Fig 24				ISDN punch-down block inside
Fig 25				pole maint
Fig 26				pole brace
Fig 27 Fig 44				PG&E Smart Meter Repeater New PG&E pole, old AT&T pole (D800E)
Fig 28				cut pole new pole
Fig 29				cut pole new pole
Fig_31				General Instrument, Jerrold Starline BTN-M Broadband Telecommunications Node
Fig_32				"
Fig_33				"
Fig_34				"
Fig_35				"
Fig 36				Steel Transmission Poles on ground ready for installation
Fig 45				New Steel Transmission poles on next hill (D800E)
Fig 37				Water Pump Pole replaced, why?
Fig 38				Excavator in strange place (for 3 new transmission poles)
Fig 39				New Transmission Towers on the next ridge
Fig 40				Water Pump Pole replaced
Fig 41				PG&E new Voltage Regulator Nov 2021
Fig 42				2022-01-25 New Voltage Regulator in Ukiah
Fig 43				Burger King (Perkins St) Hi & Lo power EV charging
Fig 43B				Tesla Super Charger
Fig 46				Woodpecker hotel & Vulture
Fig 47				Black Boxes Chained to Poles
Fig 48 & Fig49				Gift Wrapped Pole
Fig 50				Fault Indicator (3 Rapid Red flashing Lights)
Fig 51				Pad Mounted Transformer
Fig 52				Helicopter N216AP lifting PG&E pole

Photos

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Fig 1	Single Phase 12kV AC Mains Copper telephone (DSL) cable.
Fig 2	Single Phase 12kV AC Mains Copper telephone (DSL) cable.
Fig 3	Cable TV(fiber only)  top left making a right turn.  Copper pair  telephone cable.  Also see Fig 8 More photos of Cable TV Fig TV1 Other end of coax after making right turn (marked Cable TV on photo) Fig TV2  End of nearby short street Fig TV3 pole down Wildwood Dr.
Fig 4	Single Phase 12kV AC Mains A single petticoat insulator corresponds to about 12 kV, see Fig 22. Two phone trunk cables, one makiing a left turn and the other going straight.
Fig 5	The end of the 3-phase 12 kV AC mains.  There's a water well and storage tank to the right fed by the heavy black cable. The left-hand drop is a 1-ph 3-wire 120/240V supply and the right-hand one is a 4-wire high-leg delta (Wiki). (thanks to Paul C. & N. McLain) There's also a phone feed to the well house. The water tank is located at the peak of the ridge road.  Across the street from the pump house is a residence.
Fig 40	See Fig 5 above for views of this pole prior to it's replacement. This is the only pole I've seen where the cable TV and phone lines were moved.  There are many many poles around here where the new pole has the PG&E electric lines and the old pole right next to it has the cable TV and phone lines with it's top chopped off. (eg. see Fig 28)
Fig 6	60 kV Transmission line crosses the road and the 12 kV distribution line.
Fig 7	3-Phase 12 kV AC Mains with a fuse in each of the three wires. Copper telephone cable.
Fig 8	T intersection on the street and on the pole. 3-Phase 12 kV AC going along the main road. The 3-phase lines to the right are not connected to the main line above because the three switches(cutouts) are open. This is the idea of a grid.  Lines can be connected together in different ways.  This allows isolating part of the grid while keeping the rest of the grid hot.  Without the switches you would need to shut down a much larger area if there was a problem anywhere. The Comcast fiber cable makes a right turn here and does not continue on my street. The telephone cable continues up my street.
Fig 9	Another T street intersection. This time all the 3-phase 12 kV lines are connected (switches closed). 220 VAC feed from adjacent pole to a house. Cable TV coax & BTN-M node Phone cable and junction boxes.
Fig 10	3-Phase 12 kV AC near the DSL box. U-turn is on fiber cable to avoid cutting it. thanks to David WB8FOZ: aka:"snowshoe" a) So there's enough slack to allow both ends to the ground & into the splice truck. b) If a pole is wiped out, the snowshoe breaks loose before the fiber is overstressed and fractures internally.
Fig 11 Note cross-connect boxes (on right) can appear by themselves, But DSLAM cabinets (center) will always be accompanied by power cabinets (left).	There's a fiber optic cable from the central telephone office that feeds a box with a DSL converter. There's also cable TV on the pole. Digital subscriber line access multiplexer (Wiki: DSLAM)  Note: the maximum distance from the DSLAM to subscriber is about 17,000 feet. Power box is on left with labels and lights about mains power and generator. The DSLAM box is in the center.  Crossover box is the one on the right.
DLSAM box - DMAX1120 (Google) (top to bottom) Battery (12 hour) cross-connect Primary Shelf cross-connect Expansion Shelf	Crossover box shown below.  Note large punch down areas on left and right.  Each of these is connected to a cable with a large number of pairs.  These connections are not disturbed.  In the center part are the crossover pairs that connect one cable to the other cable.  If a pair has a problem in cable A then that pair can be abandoned and the crossover connected to a good pair.  But when there are no longer any good pairs there's a problem and a new cable needs to be installed. While I was at the DSLAM there were two other subscribers, both of which could receive telephone calls, but had no dial tone so could not place outgoing calls. Above the two rows of line cards are black devices with a white circle. These are Lightening protectors.  84 in the upper group and 132 in the lower group for a total of 216. DSLAM box cards at the left with: 2 LEDs are for Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). 3 LEDs are for ADSL. 4 LEDs are for Optical Cable Transceivers (OC3-XCVR). 8 LEDs are Central Processing Units (CPU). 3 LEDs & 3 Test Points are Power Supply Units (PSU). 4 LEDs & 2 Pair of jacks are ?? When a black cross-connect block is pulled the subscriber is disconnected and a test set can be used to check for dial tone and place a test call. PS It's my understanding that the line cards could be replaced with a Fiber To The Home (FTTH) line card.  But that would require running fiber from the DSLAM to each house. also see my web page The End of AT&T Landline Telephones.
Backup Generator to maintain DSL during PG&E outages.	DSL is provisioned on top of a normal copper pair phone line.  The phone line falls under FCC Title II regulations, so there's a requirement that it work during emergency situations such as AC power failure.  This is not the case for most other providers of internet service. Also see Rural Internet, Generators, at&t DSL,  This is a specialized Kohler Diesel generator. It has a very large fuel tank and a small engine generator. It might be the Genrac XD5000E "Shore Power" (Wiki) generator. 12 Gallon fuel tank gives run time of 32.5 hours at 50% load (505 of 5000 Watts = 2500 Watts). But the actual load in this case is probably more like 500 Watts. 3600 RPM
Fig 12	I think this is a capacitor bank used for Power Factor (Wiki) correction.  Many of the loads connected to the AC mains have inductive reactance which increases the current in the transmission lines which is lost power due to heat.  So, by making the load look more like a resistor less power is wasted in heating the transmission line. In the EU there are rules about the power factor of electrical devices so that the overall system operates near a power factor of 1.0.
Fig 13	There is a cable TV amplifier that has 2 cables on each end, why? answer from Neal: ----------------- Because cable TV networks utilize two types of distribution cables: - TRUNK is designed for to carry signals over long distances with minimum noise and distortion. Trunk signal levels are optimized for minimum noise and distortion. Trunks may be cascaded to depths up to 30 amplifiers (although I once heard of a trunk line 67 amplifiers deep). Trunk lines are never tapped. Trunk is typically implemented with 0.750" solid aluminum sheath cable, although other sizes will work just as well. - FEEDER is designed for short runs within a small area (a block or two) to feed customers. Feeder lines are tapped as needed by neighboring structures, typically one tap per pole. Feeders run at substantially higher levels than trunk in order to provide the necessary level to drive the taps. However, the higher operating levels result in higher distortion levels; consequently, feeders are typically limited to two amplifiers ("line extenders") per run. Feeder is typically implemented with 0.500" solid aluminum sheath cable, although other sizes will work just as well. The amplifier shown in the photo is a "terminating bridger" (or a "5-amp" in the lingo of line techs, who refer to amps by their Jerrold model numbers). The trunk line enters upper left, and is amplified to a level of around +45 dBmV (which equals about -3.75 dBm, or 177.83 mV RMS at 75 ohms characteristic impedance). This signal is split three ways, producing three feeder outputs. These are the other three cables connected to the amplifiers. One feeder heads to the left to feed a neighborhood off camera. The other two head to the right to feed two more neighborhoods. For a detailed explanation, see: http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/nu_lectures/lecture13/pdf/CATV.pdf -------------------------- Also on the right there is a tap with a single coax line going to a residence. A black cylindrical telephone breakout box and a rectangular metal telephone box on the pole.
Fig 14	This is the pole for my house. 6 kV single phase AC at the top with a transformer feeding center tapped 220 VAC to the house. The telephone trunk has no tap on this pole, it's on the next pole further from the central office with a a couple of return cables. This really hurts for DSL since I'm the last house that can get DSL service.
Fig 15	Close up of my telephone service at the pole.
Fig 16	This is on the next pole down the street where my two phone cables are branched off the main telephone cable. You can see the two cables going to the right to my place.
Fig 17	This is the pole for my house. The large conduit at the left is the underground 220 VAC  feed to my house. There are two telephone cables to my house.  The original cable is the one that is buried in the ground.  The small conduit on the right was installed when the house was built to make installing cable TV easier, but there's no way the cable TV company will extend service to those of us who are too far out in the forest so it's being used for a 6-pair phone cable.
Fig 18	At the upper left of the photo is the electric panel that also has the electric meter. The box to it's right is the demarcation box (demark) or Network Interface Device (Wiki: NID) The cable at the bottom center is the original telephone cable.  To it's right is what was supposed to be the cable TV conduit which now has another 6pair telephone cable.  The small conduit to the left is the extension cord for the shipping container. This is a 6 line demark box that came with the house.  But the cover was broken. Note that each of the 6 lines has 2 pair so there's a total of 12 pairs going into the house.. CO Cable Color Code No. Color Function 1 Wht/Blue Home Phone 2 Wht/Orange FAX & DSL 3 Wht/Green 4 Wht/Brown 5 Wht/Slate 6 Red/Blu x
Fig 23	The cable in the large cable TV conduit is a 6 pair CO phone cable. The other large cable coming up from the concrete is the original CO phone cable and has been cut off, i.e. no longer being used but probably OK. The medium sized cable coming out of the wall at the lower left is a 6 pair CAT3 cable installed for ISDN service and makes a  home run to the ISDN jack in my office (now used for FAX/DSL). The upper left wht/org pair is the home phone line.  The upper right Blue/White pair is the FAX, DSL line.  Of the group of 4 cables coming out of the wall 3 are quad cables (Red/Green & Yellow/Black) and 1 of them is the ground wire (connects at the top center of the box). Although this box can support 4 lines there are jumpers so now it's only supporting 2 lines.  I'll change this in the near future when the Panasonic KX-TA824 telephone system is installed.
Fig 24	Inside end of ISDN (Wiki) cable, maybe 1999? Wires have been brought out from the adjacent flush wall jack box and fed to this surface mount RJ-11 Jack. There are 16 punch down terminals, but they are paired so it's only 8 terminals. The Red-Green pair to the socket connects to the Wht/Brn pair from the adjacent flush box. They are in the lower left corner. Not line pair is connected to the Yellow-Black socket wires.
Fig 19	The left side of the AC mains entrance panel has the underground conduit feeding the analog electric meter.  PG&G says they are going to install a smart meter, but it's been a couple of years and it hasn't happened yet. The right side contains some breakers.  The door is hinged at the top and will not stay open unless someone holds it.  There's another breaker panel in the garage (see the kitchen oven repair "Wiring for new oven" for a little more on it)
Fig 20	Small & Large Loading Coils in the cylindrical cases. These are typically 88 mH Inductors.
Fig 21	This high voltage power tower is visible from my front door. See close up view (Fig 21) below.
Fig 22	Close up of High Voltage Transmission Tower.  6 Wires or two three phase lines. Distribution (Wiki) is what's on the wooden poles and is commonly 7.2, 12.47, 25, and 34.5 kV, "12 kV for the poles on my street. Transmission (Wiki) is for moving electricity over long distances and is done at voltages much higher than for distribution and the height above ground is also much higher. You can estimate the line-line voltage by counting the petticoat insulators: 1 - 12 Kv 3 - 34.5kv 4 - 46kv 5 - 69kv 7 - 92kv 22 -345kv So for this case 5 petticoats = 69 kV line to line voltage or (69 kV/SQRT(3) = 39.8 kV to ground. PS to take this photo from my front door requires a long telephoto lens ( and scroll down a little).
Fig 25 Pole Maintenance a. night view b. day view c. base work	Man on right (00:00:12) with chain saw or weed eater. Man on left (00:26:00) working at base of pole. Osmose - Wood Preservation - Wood Pole Maintenance -
Fig 26 Pole Brace
Fig 27 PG&G Smart Meter Repeater Fig 44  Pole in background is wrapped, it also has metal cross arms. foreground pole shows signs of woodpeckers Fig 48 Old pole was removed 26Oct22 Fig 49 New pole (background), adjacent to Fig 48 pole, is also wrapped & metal cross arm. Foreground pole is woodpecker holed.	Over a year ago PG&E installed a smart electric meter but it was read the old fashioned way. But now Jan 2015, a repeater has been installed on a ridge line up the road and it's now "smart". Note since this is a PG&E pole they just use the neutral and one of the 115 VAC transformer outputs to power the repeater. If the power fails at that pole, like happened last week, PG&E can see that the repeater is down since it has an ID. They can also see what houses up stream have power and figure out about where the problem is. PG&E replaced the pole that had been used by every woodpecker in the neighborhood, including the Smart Meter repeater.  They cut off the top of the old pole just above the phone lines which are still on the old pole.  This has been done to maybe a hundred nearby poles in the last year.
Fig 28 at&t no longer maintaining poles	PG&E has put in a new pole and moved their wires to the new pole then cut off the top of the old pole leaving the at&t phone cable.  But at&t has not moved the phone cable to the new pole.  It's my understanding that at&t has an obligation to maintain the outside copper wires, but it seems they are not doing it. These two poles are on my street.  I wonder in how many other places are they ignoring maintenance with the idea that they are going to abandon this outside plant? California AB 2395 "Telecommunications: replacement of public switched telephone network."
Fig 29 at&t no longer maintaining poles	PG&E has put in a new pole and moved their wires to the new pole then cut off the top of the old pole leaving the at&t phone cable.  But at&t has not moved the phone cable to the new pole.  It's my understanding that at&t has an obligation to maintain the outside copper wires, but it seems they are not doing it.
Fig 36 Wooden poles replaced with metal poles. Fig 45 the poles on the next hill have been replaced. Close Up cropped from Fig 45	New Steel Transmission Poles 20 June 2019 laying on the ground.  The old wooden poles still standing. I'm guessing this is so that in the event of a fire the pole will not burn.. The problem is steel gets weak when heated so may slump, but that better than dropping the line on the ground. Taken with G6 cell phone from parked car. See Ukiah 29 June 2019 PG&E Poles - Fig 45 photo taken with Nikon D800E using 200mm f/4 lens hand held.  Then cropped.  I tried this with my cell phone but when zooming in there was a fuzzy image.  Click on the Close Up to see more detail.
Fig 38 Excavator at top of hill why?	There has been a lot of PG&E work for the past few months where they are installing new wooden distribution poles next to existing wood poles.  The new poles are larger in diameter and maybe taller, but the new wires are considerable larger.  Maybe to make it less likely they will break if a tree branch falls or maybe because the whole US electrical grid need to double in capacity if gasoline is going to be replaced with electricity from the grid.  Probably the former reason. When the new hole is dug, it is NOT using an auger, but rather a wand with I assume compressed air/water.  Maybe because the new pole is right next to the old pole, or maybe it's a better way to dig the hole? Ans: to avoid underground utilities Used to dig holes for the 3 new transmission poles (not a tower).
Fig 37  2021 Oct 22: Replacing distribution wood pole next to the HV lines & Water Pump	The PG&E electrical outage map shows: Start Time: 9:01 am Estimated restoration: 5:00 pm Customers affected: 35 A month ago I received two letters saying my power would be out for a pole replacement, both times it did not happen. So this time the power outage happened, but there was no warning letter.
Fig 39 New Transmission Poles on next ridge	New steel poles (not lattice type towers) replaced the wooden poles and cross arm on the next hill over.
Fig 41 Voltage Regulator	YouTube: T&D PowerSkills:  Pole Top Equipment - Voltage Regulators [PREVIEW] -
Fig 42 2022-01-25 New Voltage Regulator in Ukiah	There is an existing apartment complex behind the voltage regulator and an apartment complex under construction across the street.  This is the second day of the install.
Fig 43	Burger King (Perkins St, Ukiah, CA) Hi & Lo power EV charging Located less than a minute from the 101 freeway. 4 cars can be at the two high power charging stations at the left. 2 cars can be at the low power pedestal on the right. Note massive transformer to the far right.
Fig 43B Eight Station Tesla Supercharger (Wiki) - downtown Ukiah	There are 8 charging stations and 4 white cabinets.  Because two charging stations share an equipment cabinet these are V2 (125 - 150 kW) charging stations. (4 of the V3 chargers share a single cabinet. The larger SquareD box to the right is probably to organize the wiring. Note the pad mounted transformer (also see Fig 51) behind the charger.
Fig 46	Woodpecker Hotel Arrows point so some of the rooms made by woodpeckers. I don't think the birds on the wire are woodpeckers and I've heard may be using the holes. Vulture 2024 Jan 5 Noon Sunning
Fig 47	Black Boxes Chained to Poles The left two photos are of one of the boxes and the phone & HV lines above it. I do not see any connection between the lines and the box, but the box is labeled Danger High Voltage. The box in the left photo is 0.4 miles before the Flock Crime Solving camera and the box in the right photo is 0.5 miles after the Flock camera.  Both boxes are pointing at the road (they could be mounted behind the pole to be less visible) and mounted at about the same height as a car window.  They appeared a month or two after the Flock camera was installed. There's a good possibility that these are speed monitoring boxes the replace the old dual rubber hose system.  This allows the local authority to see how fast people are going.  But when coupled with the Flock camera can be used to hand out speeding tickets.  The Valentine 1 Radar Detector shows that these are in fact traffic radars. I'm guessing that the two radar car counters (the signal seems weak for a speed radar) on either side of the Flock camera may be to audit it's counts. The RADAR signal comes out of the right side on both units.
Fig 50 Click on image for top of the pole close up.	Fault Indicator (3 Rapid Red flashing Lights) 20120146661 Fault indicator capactive power source, Kirk Thomas, 2012-06-14, - cited by 11 patents When power is present a current transformer charges a capacitor.  When the AC line is off the capacitor powers the flashing LED. Schweitzer, Eaton, ABB, Schneider
Fig 51 Pad Mounted Transformer (Wiki)	At the time I took these photos I suspected this was a box holding Fiber Optic cable. But it turns out to be a pad mounted AC transformer, part of the electrical grid. So I've moved it from the The End of AT&T Landlines web page to here.
Fig 52. Helicopter N216AP lifting PG&E pole - 2024 March 18 working with N410AP. White buildings in background are a pot grow.

Hybrid Fibre-coaxial (Wiki)

Instead of the old fashioned cable TV system where only coax was used the system Comcast is using here is called Hybrid Fibre-coaxial.  The frequency compensating line amplifiers have been eliminated by installing nodes every mile or so and running coax to the subscribers where the length of the coax run is short enough that no amplifier is needed.  The system is based on the General Instrument, Jerrold Starline BTN-M Broadband Telecommunications Node.  As far as I can tell this box can use either coax or fiber (Wiki) in the path from/to the headend (Wiki) or downstream.  At the headend (Wiki, CMTS) there are multiple fibers connecting to the internet.  There are up to four coax I/O ports that can go to subscribers.  The classical cable TV system was one way from the headend to the subscriber, but for internet a two way system is needed.

YouTube: Cable Television Node- inside the Fiber - Coax node box
5 - 200 MHz for Return (Up Load) and 50 - 750 MHz for Foreword (Down Load).
If one TV channel takes up 6 MHz then slightly more than 100 channels are available for a single path.  Maybe twice that if a "split" system is used?

DOCSIS 3.0 (Wiki) is the current cable modem standard.  In versions prior to 3.0 only one TV channel was used limiting the bandwidth, but now at least 4 channels are supported with no maximum number defined.  With 4 channels the max download throughput is 152 Mb/s (what Comcast advertises for is small business service).

There is an impact of this wider bandwidth on the Wireless router (Wiki) that you attach to the modem.  The first generation routers only worked at 2.4 GHz and only supported a limited amount of bandwidth.  The newer routers support multiple channels on both 2.4 and 5.8 Ghz allowing a number of people to have simultaneous connections. 

PS I looked into Mobile broadband modems (Wiki) but they have data caps and only work with a reasonably strong cell phone signal.  Something I do not have.

7039317 Reconfigurable node for a hybrid fiber cable network, Marlin McGregor, General Instrument Corporation,  May 2, 2006, - the Starline BTN-M node
Note that two fibers are used in this system.  One for download and one for upload so the system is potentially symmetrical unlike ADSL where the "A" stands for asymmetrical.  This allows for high speed uploads, like needed for video broadcasting (i.e. a Youtube channel).

Fig 31	The input is the upper left fat cable. There are two outputs the lower left and lower right. Telephone cable is below the node box.
Fig 32	Can not tell much
Fig 33	One input & 3 outputs one with a tap. Telephone cable is below the node box.
Fig 34	One input & one output with a tap. Telephone cable is below the node box.
Fig 35	One Input, 3 outputs one with a tap.

Fire & Vegetation

On 8 October 2017 there was a forest fire very close to my house.  We heard from the sheriff that the probable cause was a tree knocking down a power line.  But today I read an article that said ""The utility company is charged with maintaining its power lines and the vegetation around them to prevent wildfires."  I don't think that sentence applies to trees falling on power lines, but rather to preventing the High Voltage lines (not eht 220 volt lines that feed houses) from touching vegetation.  Note that if the High Voltage lines touch vegetation the electrical arc can state a fire.  So, as far as I know, they maintain a ten foot separation.

I've asked the authors of the article to clarify this.

Pacific Intertie DC power transmission system

This is a DC power transmission system (Wiki).
It might also be used for ELF communications with submarines?
3993989 ELF communications system using HVDC transmission line as antenna, Gedaliahu Held, K. R. Ananda Murthy, TRW, 1976-11-23, - cites 9 patents (MSK), cited by 25 patents -  uses a coupler, like for campus carrier current (Wiki) AM ratio station

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