from FB group Bell Telephone…
2018-11-22 Happy Turkey day!
I use solder all the time, and I trust it as long as it’s done properly.
But one thing I learned in my decades of telephone work is that the wiring systems the telcos developed were tested and proven before they were deployed, and they were an optimum combination of cost, reliability, effectiveness, and probably most important, conservation of labor. I can see soldering the thousands of pairs in a CO where it’s permanent, but in the field where things are changing, it is much faster and less expensive to use IDC (punch down) connections. In ’98 I brought up the new HQ, three floors worth of crossconnects in under a week until I had callouses on my fingers from handling the crossconnects. Same with several weekends of a major MPOE move. Lots of memories of those. I couldn’t have done it without my punchdown tools.
