Check in ...East Coast BLACKOUT

"Montblack" wrote:
My comment was home phone "wire" (singular) + DSL wire (singular) = 1
standard household phone wire pair. Maybe could have been more clear. I
meant "each" wire inside the pair. You (and Peter Gottlieb) read 2 separate
pair of wires - I think.

I'm not at all sure what to make of that. In phone-speak, nobody ever
talks about "wires" or "strands". You talk about "pairs". A 2-pair
cable will have in it 4 wires:

blue w/ white stripes
white w/ blue stripes
orange w/ white stripes
white w/ orange stripes

The blue/white pair is pair #1, and the two wires which make up this
pair are twisted around each other. The orange/white pair is pair #2,
and are likewise twisted around each other. If you've got 4-pair cable
(pretty common), pairs 3 & 4 will be green-white and brown-white (I hope
I got that right). The color code goes on for hundreds of combinations.
This kind of cable is commonly known as UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair).

Older houses might have "quad" cable, which has 4 wires colored red,
green, black, and yellow. Pair #1 is red/green, pair #2 is
black/yellow. You don't see this much any more. Its fine for voice,
but I'm not sure DSL can run over quad cable (because the wires are not
twisted into pairs, the electrical characteristics are inferior to the
twisted pair cable described above).

Now I'm confused. Is my DSL running at higher frequencies, over the same
(single) wire strand that my voice is running on?

Ugh. Again, not sure what to make of this. Your voice service is not
running on a "single wire strand", it's running on a single pair. The
most common type of residential service has two pairs going to your
house. As originally envisioned, the second pair would be used for a
second phone line, or possibly as a spare if the first one went bad.

Depending on how the local telco and DSL providers get along, your DSL
service might be on the same pair as your phone service, or it might be
on the other pair. In either case, it is certainly running at higher
frequencies.