Half a century ago, home
wiring was done in an ad hoc fashion. The first trades on the building site
would drill holes to run their services. Subsequent tradesmen would later
arrive and proceed to install their wiring in the existing wire paths. This practice
resulted in electrical, telephone, and television cables strung through the
same paths and holes throughout the home, which caused cable usefulness to
degrade. Even with today's technology, such as 56-kbit/sec modems, household
cabling can restrict modem data speed to half because the data must travel
through telephone wire, which was not designed for this application. Consumers
are generally unaware of this restriction and falsely blame hardware for the
slower performance.
There are several methods
of interconnecting wiring: daisy chain, bridge-tap, and star. Telephone lines
are often daisy-chained from one room to the next. Should a break occur in the
wire, several rooms could be affected. This arrangement is problematic because
finding the location of the broken wire requires tracing the wire from tap 1
through tap 5. To repair the break, an installer would need to connect a new
cable between taps 2 and 3, yet leave the remaining original wire intact.
Equally problematic, taps 3 to 5 would be kept out of service during repair,
interrupting regular phone use.
No comments:
Post a Comment