What do the little boxes that the phone company has around our neighborhood do?
What do the little boxes that the phone company has around our neighborhood do? If you have underground phone wiring in your neighborhood, as opposed to phone wiring that runs in the air on poles, then you will frequently see these little boxes all over your neighborhood — one for every two or three houses or so. A typical box in the southeastern United States might look like this: This box is two or three feet (about a meter) high and perhaps 8 inches (20 cm) square. If you have read the HSW article entitled How Telephones Work, then you know that what runs into your house for each telephone line is a pair of copper wires. What is running through your neighborhood is a thick underground cable containing perhaps 25 or 50 pairs of copper wires. The little green box is a place where the 50-pair cable pops out of the ground so that a phone company employee can splice into it. They happen to be building a new subdivision nearby, and here is what one of the boxe
