When you don’t know jack

by David Zimmer

In the good old days, having a telephone at your leafy bower was more often the exception than the norm. Today, the reality (as unromantic as it may be) is that most cottagers have some sort of telephone service. At my place, the old rotary phone is bolted to the wall at the bottom of the stairs, so while you wait on hold to report yet another power outage to Hydro One, that is where you must stand, doing the two-step shuffle at the end of a short cord. 

I know I am not alone in the desire to have a phone jack next to the sofa. Or on the porch. And wouldn’t it be nice to get an internet connection for a laptop without stringing wire across the middle of the living room? In the not-so-distant past, having an extra telephone jack installed meant a service call from Ma Bell and a big fat charge on your next bill. Thanks to deregulation, however, Canadian telcos have washed their hands of indoor installations. It is now Bell’s responsibility to bring dial tone to your doorstep; interior installation and maintenance are up to you. So if you’d like an extra jack or two at the cottage, you can either call a professional installer and pay for the privilege or simply do it yourself, a relatively straightforward task once you understand the basics.

Dial tone arrives at your cottage at a “demarcation point” that separates exterior wiring (Bell’s responsibility) from interior wiring (yours). Newer telephone installations will have a snazzy grey box called a Network Interface Device (NID) that has a handy plug to separate inside and outside wiring for diagnostic purposes. NIDs can be located either inside or outside the cottage. To find yours, either follow the wire coming in from the outside world to where it connects with your internal lines or work the other way round, tracing your inside wire to where it meets the incoming service. Older installations may not have a NID; if you can’t see one, the demarcation point could be in several different spots, either inside or outside the cottage. Because these older setups are not consistent, Bell’s repair service (dial 611) will help you locate them, free of charge.

With the demarcation point located, there are two wiring patterns, or “topologies,” you can use to set up a new phone jack. The easiest is called a “bus,” or “continuous loop,” where you simply run wire from an existing jack to the new location. With the second method, called “star” or “home run,” each jack is serviced by a separate wire that connects directly to the demarcation point. This requires more cable and labour, but is preferable to a continuous loop system where, like balky Christmas-tree lighting, a fault in one section of wire will affect all the jacks that are downstream of it. (Most installations use
a combination of the two.)

To rig up your new jack, you’ll want to use modular surface-mount jacks, small beige or white boxes that are usually fastened to the baseboard. These are available at places like Radio Shack, along with the wire you will need, called “quad” or “station wire.” Telephone wires are organized into colour-coded pairs that deliver dial tone to your phone. Station wire contains two pairs of smaller wire – coded red, green, yellow, and black. If your cottage only has a single phone line, like most, you only use one pair, the red-and-green combo. If you want a second line down the road sometime, the yellow/black pair awaits service. 

Whether you fish the wire through walls or under floors or surface-mount it, once you get your line from the demarcation point to the new location, just pop open the jack and you’ll see it has four terminal posts. Using wire strippers or wire cutters, gently strip about 1⁄4" of the red and green wires in your station wire down to bare copper, then loop each wire clockwise around its matching terminal and tighten the connector. If you find that some innovative person has wired your cottage using the yellow/black pair, or another combination, rather than the standard red/green, don’t fret. You may as well be consistent and make your additions following the existing colours. Hide any loose wire, screw the jack to the baseboard, and snap its cover on. At the demarcation point – or an existing jack if you are creating a continuous loop – you simply repeat the process, attaching the red wire to the red terminal and green to green. Now just plug a phone into your new jack and listen for the dial tone. If you’re feeling sociable, reach out and touch someone. If you’d rather be left alone, call Hydro One.

 

 

Published in the April/May 2005 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

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