Direct burial phone line or regular in a conduit?

[kcflhrc]

36 years here. Back at Windstream now selling Data bandwidth for the most part. But 21 years as a tech, and 14 as an engineer. I practically cried when Nortel went belly up. But worked on a lot of other brands too.

I'm still working on and maintaining Nortel PBX's with my company. There is currently no end of sale notice for the current 7.6 release, still a lot of that stuff out there, it just works. But back to the original topic, JUST DIRECT BURY SOME 2 PAIR CAT 3 JELLY FILLED CABLE AND YOU WILL BE GOOD TO GO, PUT SOME LIGHTNING PROTECTION ON IT TOO.

 

[truckdiagnostics]

Go wireless and be done with it! 256' for data? then you count what is in your buildings. You will have to boast the signal or you are going to loose to much on the data side. Then if you have to bury two in condute, not to mention the cost for lightening protection. Wireless has come a long way. Done the direct bury gig. Hands down wireless more cost effective and easier in the long run. Done it both ways.

 

[JerryK]

Conduit with ethernet cable for laptop in barn, hard wires for phone land line. Hard wires for alarm system so I can sleep good at night away from my toys in the barn. Video cables for video surveillance system. Coax cable for barn TV hooked up to Satellite receiver in house. Plus, lots of room to add more wires in the future. That's why I went with conduit...... [ plus, I are a has been electrucian ]

PS: I have been fighting these type of battles all my life. Guy wants to run just this, only run a 1/2" conduit.. then later want to add something. Pays sometime to go big, maybe run duel conduits, think long term.... Been there.....

 

[Pilot]

I don't know about phone line, but we had direct bury power line out to our well and after about 18 years it failed. Naturally it was in December. Had a location guy come out, said the break was "here", dug down to the line & could find no damage. Cost a lot to get a new trench dug, conduit installed & new line run to the switch in the garage. Conduit is cheap.

 

[kcflhrc]

We have buried phone cable that has been in the ground since the early 70's. If it is real buried cable, phone or electric, it will typically out live you. Most people will short cut the electrical and just bury some regular romex to their shop or well and think it will last, it wont. We have 2 lights on rock pillars down by the highway, 900' from our house running on real buried romex, the wiring was put in when the house was built in 70.

 

[MossRoad]

We have buried phone cable that has been in the ground since the early 70's. If it is real buried cable, phone or electric, it will typically out live you. Most people will short cut the electrical and just bury some regular romex to their shop or well and think it will last, it wont. We have 2 lights on rock pillars down by the highway, 900' from our house running on real buried romex, the wiring was put in when the house was built in 70.

We've had the phone company out half a dozen times in 19 years at our current house. The neighbor has too. I had two pairs buried to my house. One was our personal line, the other was a centrex line for work. One of the pairs failed. So the ran a 6 pair overhead for the centrex, but left the personal line on the buried pair. That failed soon thereafter and they had to come out again and use one of the overhead pairs.

Then a couple weeks ago my neighbor's phone and internet failed. Instead of running his overhead (we share the same pole between our houses), they sent out a crew and did directional boring through three yards and under the road! Then sent out another crew to hook it up. Good grief. One guy in a bucket truck van could have done it overhead in an hour. What a waste of resources, both mechanical and human.

 

[Kenneth in Texas]

Believe i will go with regular phone wire and conduit, that direct burial stuff im seeing worries me with all the moles and gofers I have.

 

[k0ua]

Believe i will go with regular phone wire and conduit, that direct burial stuff im seeing worries me with all the moles and gofers I have.

That is why some of those direct burial phone cables. have a "gopher steel" sheath.