We Have Dial Tone!

As the previous telephone post indicated, our local phone company did indeed complete new wiring into our neighborhood.  Our "phone man" came to finish the installation of our new landline a couple of days ago.  This is all being done in the process of getting a high-speed DSL data connection in place.

When we bought this condo back in 2007, I took a few pictures even before the interior was complete.  As luck would have it, I caught an image of the telephone access box for our building and the adjacent one.  It lies about eight feet above the floor at the left edge of our building.  (closer view on the right.)


Over the years, as people have added phones, the box has gotten busier.  Wires are added and organized on the "Egyptian plan."


Phone and satellite cables are sometimes added by running them through a window, stringing them along the wall at floor level and hoping that they will stay in place. (They never do)  For some reason, Linda has never liked this highly flexible system and so we planned ahead and pre-wired our condo with conduit in the walls and phone/satellite outlets in three locations.  The feed was planned from the rear of the flat.

The installer was confronted with his starting point on the front of the building.  Of course, he didn't have a ladder but our bawaab supplied a chair for him to stand on.


This is actually a three-man job.  With one installer on hand at the phone box, another went up onto the roof of the building. Fortunately, there is a hole punched through the roof and a ladder in place for just this sort of thing.  The third third man was positioned on our back balcony.


The man on the roof was able to drop the wire (he brought plenty!) over each edge.  Connections were made on both ends and about 75 feet of slack cable was wound up in a ball and left at the backside, just in case.  The installer connected a portable handset to my outlet wiring and proudly demonstrated the dial tone to Linda.  She was suitably impressed with our combined success.


Exactly how the phone company keeps track of the wiring at the box on the front of the building is a bit of a mystery - sort of like how the pyramids were built.

We only had one complication.  In the middle of the installation, the building's elevator broke down.  This left our rooftop guy having to hoof it up to the twelfth floor.  This is not nearly as big a problem as having the electricity go out in which case the climb would have to be made in the dark.  I should add that we have had no electricity outages this year during our first four weeks here. (Unlike last year)