Hi everyone!

From time to time, I'm called out to do some work for office tenants and sometimes for building managers. Yesterday a building manager had me out to their facility to look at running some cabling for cameras. The lines will come back to their primary communications closet.

This thing is a disaster.

But really, it's pretty darn common for office buildings like this. Tenants come and go, technology changes, etc, and most of the time things get added but never removed.

Now that the wall is full, they're trying to figure out how to reclaim some space but getting rid of old stuff.

How do I tell what's old?

I mean sure, there's probably some stuff on the wall that's not powered on, so it can probably be tossed. But there's all this..stuff. Telco stuff is outside my comfort zone. I look at a phone block and sort of freeze up. Do you guys have any advice for this sort of work? Or if I don't do it myself, do you know how I'd go about looking for someone who could do it?

Who is going to pay for all the time to not only trace out what is what and then extract the (apparently, hopefully) ‘no longer needed’ gear (and related wiring), but also the time that will be taken up figuring out how to fix whatever gets inadvertently broken?

Sometimes stuff stops working just ‘cause you were jiggling other stuff around, even though you didn’t touch that particular thing.

There will also be the temptation to make things ‘better’, which means messing with stuff that is currently in use and ‘working’. Even if just to relocate and remount the exact same boxes in a more tidy manner and/or reroute the wiring.

I view existing/old high density, long history equipment closets as a minefield. If I touch it (or just happened to be the last guy in there), it automatically becomes my problem.

How about convince them to go voip and toss it all?

Yeah. It's a minefield.

What do they need? How can they get it moving forward? What do they need from "way back when" stuff? Can you install new stuff to meet the needs, then disconnect everything else?

-jk

Often nobody knows what some of the stuff does, or for whom. Yet when it gets removed eventually (if not in short order) someone will notice something has stopped working that was working for a long time.

Perhaps an old (but still used ‘occasionally’) fax machine tucked away somewhere, with a phone line that no one can recall the phone number for, or even who pays for it. An alarm system with an old-school modem hook-up. A ‘dry loop’ phone line with no dial tone that turns out to be an ISDN line, or a DID inbound call routing line. Etc, etc...

Sometimes you can find equipment that ‘never should have worked when configured that way’ but somehow it was. After you touch it, it may never work that way ever again.

Sometimes it takes a catastrophe before the vested parties can agree to, and pay for, a re-do.

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/17/3655442/restoring-verizon-service-manhattan-hurricane-sandy

Yeah, you're pretty much describing every scenario I've been concerned about. I often agree to projects that are outside my experience but which I think I can work my way through with education and application of knowledge and experience. This one I turned down immediately


Haha! I like this idea! I'll have him float it past the tenants

Heck, who knows? Maybe I'll have him survey the tenants and see what they're using. For all we know, everyone is already on Voip and cable modems.

It is pretty hilarious that all this stuff is on a 12' wide and 10' tall wall that's completely filled, and I'm reasonably certain that the majority of the communications in and out of the building are all through the coax cables on this little splitter by the floor

Perhaps that wall is a side effect of not charging for the use of ‘excess’ space in the telecom closet.

Effectively the tenants surplus and disused equipment in there is squatting on valuable and scarce real estate. I would suspect that other than some loose kind of landlord permission to install gear in there, nobody was managing or supervising the allocation and consumption of wall space. *

Something of a tragedy of the commons, but in a closet.


* In some buildings a similar problem occurs in the telecom conduits that carry cables through the building, or between buildings.

I have a very small amount of experience working on the telco lines coming into the wiring closet in an office building.

I was lucky in that I had help: a telco expert who was doing the work on the building and who showed me a lot of stuff about it. He was basically an independent contractor who did wiring work in the telco closets, and also did things like network wiring of buildings. He was a former phone company employee who branched out into his own business.

It was very nice of him to impart some of his knowledge to me. He gave me enough information so that I could maintain the existing punchdown block and to add/remove items as needed.

This was a new building that we were spec'ing ourselves from scratch, and yet it still got very messy very quickly. My feeling is that if you're not working with a subject matter expert on one of these things, you're going to get yourself in trouble and possibly break things.

So see if you can find telco wiring contractor people like that one, to hire and help with the process. I don't know what they would be called in the phone book; my guy was hired by the building company.