The first trades on the building site would drill holes to run their services. Subsequent tradesman would later arrive and proceed to install their wiring via the existing wire paths created beforehand. This resulted in electrical, phone and television cables strung through the same paths and holes throughout the home, which caused cable usefulness to degrade. Even with today s technology, such as 56k modems, household cabling potentially restricts the modem data speed to half because of the phone wire installation. Consumers are generally unaware of this restriction and will falsely blame hardware for the slower performance.
Telephone lines are often daisy-chained from one room to the next.
Should a break occur in the wire, several rooms could be affected, as illustrated in Figure 1. This arrangement is problematic because finding the location of the broken wire requires tracing the wire from tap 1 through to tap 5. To repair the break, an installer would need to connect a new cable between taps 2 and 3,yet leave the remaining original wire intact. Equally problematic, taps 3 to 5 would be kept out of service during repair, interrupting regular phone use. Another method of connection is a bridge-tap or splice, which also weakens phone line signals because noise can be induced at this point.