Box on eircom pole that gives me bb - what is it?

jleavy

Hi All,
When ADSL broadband was 1st installed for me it only worked very intermittently. The line signal noise was poor or something.

In any case, some work was done on the pole 2 up from my house and as a result my broadband is now perfect. I would like to know what they have done or how they fixed it!

It looks like they installed a new box on the pole - Can anyone tell me what it is? (See attached)

On the next pole after this one we have a 10-pair cable buried down to the house (about an extra 800m)

Thanks,
Joe

AdMMM

It's not the best of pictures and without thermal imaging it's difficult to give a definitive answer but my best guess would be the engineers have installed a flux capacitor in your area.

Sponge Bob

AdMMM wrote: »

my best guess would be the engineers have installed a flux capacitor in your area.

OOOOhhhh , lovely .

Dardania

That looks like a carrier unit, which is what they use to multiplex a number of pstn lines off a single copper pair - commonly used in rural areas where there is a poor amount of copper... Usually you can't get broadband dsl through these units..

What may have happened is they put a number for your non dsl neighbours onto that unit to give you a cleaner copper? Or in putting your neighbours on that copper unit they noticed that the copper going to your house was loose and they just fixed it while there...

flux capacitor could have helped also ;-)

jleavy

Dardania wrote: »

That looks like a carrier unit, which is what they use to multiplex a number of pstn lines off a single copper pair - commonly used in rural areas where there is a poor amount of copper... Usually you can't get broadband dsl through these units..

What may have happened is they put a number for your non dsl neighbours onto that unit to give you a cleaner copper? Or in putting your neighbours on that copper unit they noticed that the copper going to your house was loose and they just fixed it while there...

flux capacitor could have helped also ;-)

OK - strange, so basically the carrier box thing-a-ma-bob is a bad thing in terms of broadband - generally speaking!

Basically I have had 100s of calls to eircom about my BB since it was installed with no action so i eventually got a line manager whom got someone to do some "stuff" resulting in that box appearing and all them cables being looped around (none of that was there previously).

I think they may have multi-plexed the secondary lines going down to my gaff.

In any case - A carrier box/flux capacitor..... Thanks!

(Happy....Happy....Christmas...)

Cabaal

It does indeed look like a DACS box, strange that they'd install onbe as it won't work with ADSL and only has benefits for PSTN services (voice), Dardania explanation could be the right one I suppose

lucernarian

Do you have a number of phone lines in operation? Yeah it seems like someone got their line pairgained and you got the freed-up line.

d22ontour

Tis a fine pole english but tis no pool.

:pac:

Dardania

Looking at the wikipedia page for pairgains: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_gain there's talk about newer model carrier units being DSLAMs...interesting idea. Maybe that;s what's happened in the OP's situation?

lucernarian

Not with that pairgain anyway. It looks identical to the pairgains that have graced Irish telephone poles for over 10 years now.

jleavy

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

Not with that pairgain anyway. It looks identical to the pairgains that have graced Irish telephone poles for over 10 years now.

When you say pairgain - your talking about Multiplexing? Right?

Someone asked if we had other lines - yes, 1 other pair in use, but 7 spare pairs that are no longer used..

amovingstatue

Looks like an outdoor krone (punchdown) box to me with two multicores coming from the junction box breaking out lines from the main trunk - black box with round top and your line bundle being the other cable

lucernarian

That box is not a krone box. It's a different shape. Krone punchdown boxes are less "rectangular" than the multigain 2000 pairgains. Made by tadiran telecommunications.

amovingstatue

To_be_confirmed wrote: »

That box is not a krone box. It's a different shape. Krone punchdown boxes are less "rectangular" than the multigain 2000 pairgains. Made by tadiran telecommunications.

right, israeli crowd aren't they? .. would they really use one of these multiplexing devices when there's a large multicore cable which must have a lot of pairs in it - would it be 50 or 100 in the cable in the photo?

christ it really is a half-arsed way to go about it, if they're using these devices all the way along the lines, the whole network must be riddled with them.

lucernarian

No, the black box is a junction box. Simple container box with lots of twisted wire pairs smeared in jelly and connected with special little joiners that have more jelly inside them, can't think of the name of them. They look like a single piece of "chocolate box" electrical wire connector, except that both wires enter on the same side.

The pairgain has 3 small cables going into it. Each of those cables would carry 2 pairs, usually one unused. Sometimes there's 3 small red wires present too, sometimes not. One of the cables is the multiplexed line back to the exchange, though I can't identify it in the photos. The thick cables are the existing main supply cable. One 30-pair going from whatever houses are served by it and one 30 pair continuing back towards the exchange. They're not all passing through a pairgain. So we hope:D

jleavy

On the picture - coming from the RIGHT hand side is from the Crossikeal exchange.

Going out to the left (or slightly towards the camera) is the main cable serving part of the Oldcastle Road as far as Drumbaragh, Kilskyre Road, Balnagon Upper and parts of Balnagon Lower.

hobsonschoice

Think you are referring to the crimps. Clear plastic where you feed both wires in one side and squah with a pair of pliers to form a Krone like connection.

Solair

There is such a thing as a DSL loop extender, which basically amplifies and repeats DSL signals, but that would not be installed at your premises, rather it would need to be half-way along a long line if you were out in the countryside. They're commonly used elsewhere in Europe, but, as far as I am aware, eircom don't bother as they don't generally give a toss about rural dwellers.

The most likely explanation is that your line had an insulation fault or some kind of minor wiring fault along the route. Eircom probably put one of 2 of your non-DSL using neighbours onto pair-gain, and gave you one of their 'clean' lines, thus solving your DSL problems.

Lorcan 17

Its a carrier unit . B/B doesnt work over carrier units .