Recently, all the phones in my house went dead, as did my DSL. It seemed likely that this was a problem with the phone company, but when it comes to dealing with the phone company knowing for sure is always better then just guessing. So I grabbed my trusty line-mans test set and headed outside to the junction box that seperates the wiring that is my responsibility from the wiring belonging to the phone company.
Opening the box, the first thing I notice is that my house is wired for two phone lines. This is probably not unusual; I assume some prior owner wanted to be able to be on-line and talk at the same time. Poking around with my butt set I find that one line is live, and one is dead. Taking nothing for granted I clip my test set to the live line and call my own cell phone. My caller ID reveals that the call is coming from a number that I don’t recognize. This tells me two things: first, that my phone problems really are the phone company’s problems, and second, that I have a whole 'nother working phone line in my house.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. My wife suggested googling the number of the second line. Doing so revealed that it is a listed number registered to someone who lives two blocks away! Our next experiment was to call the number, with the test set plugged in. It rang a few times, then someone else’s answering machine picked up! So it seems that I have an extension of this womans phone running into my house!
How does this happen, and how often does it happen? My guess is after the second line in our house was abandoned, the number was eventually assigned to someone else, and somehow somebody forgot to un-patch it from my house before wiring it into hers. Does this make any sense? Any other ideas?
Your local phone company has how many million wires and connections to keep track of? It’s a small miracle this doesn’t happen more often.
About all I can say for sure is that the other person doesn’t have DSL, as this unintended connection to your house is a “bridge tap” that would most likely make her DSL work very poorly.
This isn’t a total hijack, I hope, but it’s not worth a new thread to mention. I have no input to the specifics of the OP, but the title made me remember something from high school days.
I can’t recall exactly how it became common knowledge but there was a radio station that was very popular at night for taking requests and having low-key chats with callers on topics of the day. Nine out of ten times you would call their number you’d get a busy. But if you stayed on the line and disregarded the busy signal you could strike up a conversation with others who were also getting a busy. Sometimes you could speak with several people at once. I don’t know how common such a thing was, or whether it can still work, but it used to be great fun to “connect with” strangers over the phone is such a way.
It probably won’t work on newer switches. Some older switches had a single time slot dedicated to the “busy” tone, and simply connected all lines that were listening to busy to that slot, essentially turning it into one big conference call with the busy tone. When I was working at Bell Labs in Denver, decades ago, I remember an item in the Denver papers about the local teenagers discovering this, and chattering with each other over the busy tone. The local operating company was unconcerned about it, and issued a statement that it would quit working anyway once a planned changeover to newer equipment took place.
I don’t see the error. You say they “forgot to un-patch it from my house” but where would they do that? At the place the wires enter your house. So if you’re into re-connecting your own equipment you could have gotten to it anyway. There’s always extra lines in the same cable, or else you’d see a hundred wires on every pole.
The error is that they’ve connected a person’s line to soemone else’s house.
Aside from the obvious privacy issue, there’s a large potential for fraud - other than honesty, there’s not been anything keeping the OP from plugging a phone into that line and making free phone calls.
As for where they’d disconnect the line? At your demarc is insufficient. It needs to be disconnected at a location that people can’t access - At the pole or wherever the neighborhood wiring cabinet is located.
Thats what I thought too. I know there are a lot of wiring cabinets around that are marked as phone company property, and inside they are filled with punch blocks. I’ve always assumed that is where the actual patching goes on at the local level. I know that phone companies re-use numbers all the time; I can’t believe that they would do it in such a way that joe homeowner can reconnect to what is now someone elses phone line, for all the reasons stated above.
Technically, no. The box on the side of the house (demarcation point) is actually phone company property. (It probably even says that right on the box – the one on my house has “Property of Bell System” stamped into the metal box.) So legally, they’ve ended the connection within their property & their wiring. If the homeowner connected a phone to that line, he is the one who would be violating the law.
But I agree that it’s a bad idea, and phone companies shouldn’t do this. And the generally don’t. I expect that if the OP told them about it, they would fix it. And if he told the other phone customer, they would make sure the phone company did so!
It’s a weird gray area, really. My demarc only says “Siecor” - the manufacturer. The thing itself may be owned and maintained by the phone company, but the homeowner does have the right (and for troubleshooting, one could argue that they have the duty, unless they want to be lazy and pay for a service call) to access the wiring in the customer side of the box, which is generally accessible without tools, or with a simple flat-blade screwdriver. Something relatively specialized and not available at hardware stores (such as a can wrench) is needed to access the entire contents of the box.
It wouldn’t be the customer’s fault if the second line was connected to their in-house wiring, as that is the normal practice, unless they want to limit use of the second line to a phone that they carry out to, and plug into the demarc. Although, that is a good way to guarantee nobody picks up an extension to listen in.
Where as your line went dead I would expect somebody worked in a box in the neighborhood or somebody hit one with a car. The wires between boxes can be switched out like any modular relay and bypass (replace) a bad wire. Old wires don’t always get disconnected and as long as a phone device wasn’t connected at your house to the second line, it goes unnoticed by the phone company. They can detect a device on the end on a line, if they are looking. I believe the impedence of the line will be different, but reguardless of the method they can. Without the connection of a device on your end to the nieghbors line, they won’t likely know of the connection unless you tell them. I would mention it to them, so they can disconnect it at the box where they feed your house’s box, when they fix your connection.
Question: If I call a number and it comes up busy, can I stay connected and automatically get through to the called number when the other person hangs up?
If that question is to me, I have no idea. Others in the thread suggest that the mechanism/system that allowed this phenomenon in the past (mine was in the 50’s!) has been updated and fixed not to allow it. I could be overruled by anybody with facts, though!
The feature you are asking for is called “camp on” or “called party camp on”, and is common in PBX offerings. I don’t recall it being offered in CO environments, but I haven’t been keeping up. This is a distinct feature from “auto callback”, which means you dial a code on receiving busy, hang up, and get called back when your party is available. Sometimes people use “camp on” to mean that feature.
Voip services can provide auto call back, at least to other voip subscribers.
Both of those features have a problem on the public network in that it requires monitoring of the called number, or some protocol for the called switch to signal you that the line is now available. Easy enough inside a private system which is handling both ends of the call. There are gadgets you can buy which will attempt to keep recalling for you, irrespective of the CO you are connected to. Not something that’s ideal in terms of load on the switch.
This is a separate issue from the “teen chat line” thing which was just a side effect of the way some switches handled busy tone, and not really seen as a problem to be solved. The newer generation of switches were designed differently for other reasons.
Telus (the predominant phone company in my neck of the woods) has automatic call back. If you get a busy signal then after the first couple of beeps you get a voice prompt to press (I think) * if you want to be called back if the line is free. The service costs some amount of money but I’m not sure how much (pretty sure you can either pay whenever you use it or have a flat monthly fee if you use it a lot).
Just use a modem to do the dialing and grab the phone and turn off the modem when you hear the ring. I’ve done it a few times.
Just to be absolutely clear, if I wasn’t in the OP: the second line is wired THROUGH the demarc point and is live to one jack in the house. Its in the kids room, and they’re only three, so we never plugged a phone into it, thus our surprise.
