That was 3-pair. 2-pair is 17ppm inc. Vat.

Definitely copper clad steel. Examined under high magnification after scraping the copper off and it was very strongly attracted to a magnet.

RobertoS has a link to the stuff. The whole office has been wired with it internally too.

I put a tone on the line and checked it was still magnetic where the cable from the master socket comes out of the building to the distribution point.

To give you an idea how bad it is for DSL, when I moved the router from an extension socket to the master socket (which probably cut out about ten metres of cable) the upstream sync went from 5488kbps to 7816kbps. There is a lot more than ten metres of this wretched stuff between the master socket and the DP.

The error rate is stupidly high on upstream and VOIP calls frequently drop.

The office next door has an upstream sync of 18998kbps with an attainable of 21571 - and totally reliable VOIP.

Edited by caffn8me (Sun 31-Jul-16 23:10:35)

No, I'm intimately acquainted with D10 - four copper cores and three steel.

This has single cores colour coded in the usual telephone cable way.

From TLC, CCS 4 pair (which this is) is about 2/3 the price of the equivalent CW1308.

The fix is going to cost thousands.

In reply to a post by MHC:

And in a Krone type DC, it probably would not perform too well and be susceptible to corrosion.

The amount of copper actually in contact with the IDC terminal will be negligible. To make matters worse, it's terminated outside so is susceptible to damp.

Before I worked out what the problem was, Zen ran line tests on this circuit and the one next door (terraced mews buildings). This one was showing 600m longer.

As TLC "do" retail, any chance of their being challenged under Trades Descriptions for their description of this excrement as "telephone cable" ???

No, because it's perfectly fine for voice.

In reply to a post by caffn8me:

No, because it's perfectly fine for voice.

Until the joint corrodes!

I suspect it's still ok for voice with some corrosion. The bandwidth needed for voice is only about 3kHz. TLC does also describe it as for; 'Domestic and Small Office Extensions'.

The information on this thread reply are extensive! Very good and very useful, if i ever have a similar situation i know where im heading!

Edited by deleted (Tue 02-Aug-16 14:11:18)