Excellent work on fixing the issue, however, you will need to immediately undo it.
Posted by speddie23@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 49 comments
Back when I was still very green in the IT world, at my 2nd ever tech support job I worked for a council (basically the equivalent of a county) in Australia.
The council's works depot were expanding and they installed a portable building to use as extra offices. There was power when this was installed, but no one considered installing data points.
This was in the days before WiFi was common (back then 802.11b was the latest standard), and the council didn't have WiFi at this location. The distance meant that WiFi probably wouldn't have even worked anyway.
Discussing this with staff onsite, and me recently learning how to crimp network cables, I suggested that if the staff at the works depot can dig a trench with their backhoe between the main building and portable building, I could just run a network cable in the trench, crimp each end and we would have data to the building.
So I did exactly that and it worked. Once I am back at the main office, I proudly tell my boss that I have found a solution and made it happen.
For those who might not know, Australia has very strict laws about who can do wiring, both electrical and data wiring. You need to be qualified and licence to install things like power points, data sockets, run cables in wall, roofs, etc.
On top of that, the cable I ran was directly buried in the ground. It was not rated for direct underground burial, just your garden variety network cable.
I didn't know it at the time, but what I did was not permitted. My boss pointed out the multiple violations I made (specifically using the wrong grade of cable, and that as I was not a licenced cabler I couldn't legally install it in the manner that I did).
He was real cool about it and understood that I wasn't aware and was happy that I genuinely wanted to help, but mentioned that I would need to go and immediately go rip it all back up.
Within a few days, we had a licenced cabler install the cable legally.
Aniodia@reddit
It was a proof of concept. Make sure it works before you need to get the real technician out there.
syntaxerror53@reddit
Worked OK in theory.
So should work in practice.
Kuro_Necron@reddit
Learning through (inconsequential) mistakes is the best kind of learning
HoangGoc@reddit
true, but some mistakes can have serious consequences. It’s good to learn, but it’s better to know the rules first
No-Pause6574@reddit
There are now so many rules that no one knows them all, and typically, breaking one is the first time you become aware it exists!
Terrible_Shirt6018@reddit
That's why we have so many specialists that know their area.
Moneia@reddit
Yeah, so much criticism is "In a perfect system..." rather than being sympathetic to the realities of working with what we've got.
SolidZealousideal115@reddit
With high fees. Not to mention the rules that contradict each other.
meiandus@reddit
many Australian standards, and therefore rules are legitimately paywalled
AllSeeingAI@reddit
I remember someone saying that everyone thinks the Australians are the descendants of convicts and people tend to forget they're also the descendants of the jailers.
speddie23@reddit (OP)
Ahh that annoys me when I see "Must comply with Australian Standard bla bla bla" just to be greeted by the SAI global payment screen.
Luckily, the relevant standard here "AS/CA S009:2020 Installation requirements for Customer Cabling (Wiring Rules)" is publicly available, and has been for a long time.
https://www.austelco.org.au/publication/s009-2020/
tofuroll@reddit
I just can't imagine getting as far as having a trench dug out and laying the cable before telling your boss about it.
Renbarre@reddit
It's better to ask first especially if you are a newbie.
Terrible_Shirt6018@reddit
You found out exactly why a certified person needs to install it; They know all of those things.
rUnThEoN@reddit
Most of the time cables with no real voltage are allowed to be done by simple humans since there is no danger involved. Imagine using a optic fibre cable instead of a rj45 - since no power goes through it nothing prevents you from using it. Network cables count as telephone wire and is no fire hazard either.
I would declare it a bandaid :-)
Techn0ght@reddit
Did you know phone cables have to support 120v AC as ring voltage?
jma89@reddit
The secret in the sauce is that voltage rating is based only on the insulator, not on the cable's cross-sectional area, and air has a breakdown voltage of around 300V.
This is why basically every cable you'll ever see has a voltage rating of at least 300V: You'll never have a problem so long as the conductors don't touch. (The tricky bit is if the insulator cracks apart due to ageing/weathering and suddenly you can have shorts all over the place.)
jma89@reddit
(I know, I know, there's more to the math than a simple voltage for the breakdown voltage of a given material, but air works out to 300V or so at 0.1mm, which is where that "so long as they don't touch" bit comes from. Obviously simply going above 300 volts won't cause arcing all the time since we don't see constant bolts from high-transmission lines running at thousands of volts. Distance plays a large role here.)
SeanBZA@reddit
They actually have to support 250VDC, as that is what is used to power down line devices like ISDN and line expanders, which used to be common as an easy way to increase the number of lines at a business premise without needing to either replace cable or go to a T1 line. Single pair goes into the 0+16 box, and it them provides an additional 16 line pairs, each with their own number, providing the exchange itself has 15 spare number assignations available in the same dialling block prefix. The new line then gets a specific colour jumper installed in every IDF unit on the cable run, so that the techs do not connect a standard butt set to it, which does not appreciate the 250VDC applied to the input, and it burns up the input circuitry in the handset. By me that was a green wire instead of the black for T1 lines and ISDN, and for the expanders, 0+3 and 0+16, it was a red or orange instead. The only caveat for the expanders is you could not run DSL on them, they were fine for voice, and iffy for fax or modems.
Feyr@reddit
going outdoor gets a bit more iffy due to the lightning risk
speddie23@reddit (OP)
Not legally in Australia. It really is super regulated and super restricted.
Us plebs can basically plug in network cables between devices and wall sockets.....and that's about it.
As soon as you start going through a wall, roof, floor, etc. it needs to be done by a registered cabler to be legal. Especially if something needs to be terminated (say a cable in the wall to a wall socket or a patch panel).
As I understand it, that applies to fiber too, even though there is zero electricity involved as it's still considered communications cable.
The rules are super specific here, such as data cables need to be separated by 50mm from power cables up to a certain voltage (I believe it's 400 volts), unless you use a specific grade of separator between the cables, and once you have a higher voltage more separation is needed.
If you want to have a read of the rules, just a casual 254 page document. No biggie.
https://www.austelco.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/S009_2020.pdf
harrywwc@reddit
yeah, even doing that sort of work in your own home is frowned upon. as well as the issues of ground differential between the ends of your cable, there's also the (now defunct) issue of connecting dodgy 240V kit (well, 220V now days, supposedly) to phone lines that could shoot the 240V back down the copper cables to some poor schmuck working in the nearest exchange.
as we (oh so very) slowly move to fiber, that is less of a problem. it's just a pity that scomo (or was it 'trumbull' or maybe 'mrabbot' [and peter costello should have been his deputy]?) forced nbnco to spend so much on renewing copper instead of putting fiber in a heck of a lot of places.
still waiting on fiber - we were first told it was happening late 2013. still waiting.
spaceraverdk@reddit
I can pull as much data cable as I want to. Put up sockets wherever I need.
I can't mess with the power board, or change power cables legally without certain certs.
But I can pull all new wiring and have a certified electrician sign off on the install.
It's great to know people who are such. Especially when they know that what I do is better than household standards. I used to do cabinet electrical work in wind turbines. 400mm2 Al cable and 300mm2 copper splicing. At 700V. Not only did it have to be good, but also look good.
TinnyOctopus@reddit
Just to sanity check my napkin math, that's about 22 ish cm diameter cables?
BeefyIrishman@reddit
I think you might have moved a decimal place in your math(s). Including insulation, an unarmored single-core 400mm² cable is roughly 31-34mm in diameter, nowhere near 22cm (220mm).
meiandus@reddit
At what diameter does a single core cable stop being cable and just become a metal bar?
BeefyIrishman@reddit
A single conductor cable can have multiple strands of wire inside making them more flexible, but they are all twisted together without insulation and thus act as a single conductor.
A multiple conductor cable has insulation between the different conductors, but each conductor can have multiple strands of wire the same as a single conductor cable.
Danthemanlavitan@reddit
When it is no longer flexible. A metal bar will bend and then stay where it was bent to, but a cable will move back from the bent position or not hold the bend correctly.
This is an unscientific description bought to you by a random on the internet who thinks it is a good definition.
spaceraverdk@reddit
The 240 I linked to isn't a cable as much as a bar. But Alu isn't rigid as steel. Still takes 3 guys to wrestle the whole cable around.
TinnyOctopus@reddit
I did indeed. 22 mm is right.
spaceraverdk@reddit
A 400mm2 single core cable is roughly 24mm in diameter.
We used these 4x240mm2 for small turbines, the larger one for direct drive 9mw
https://www.nexans.dk/da/products/Power-cables-1-145-kV/LV-power-cables-1-kV/Aluminium-cables/DK-AXQ-Eas37837.html
https://www.nexans.dk/da/products/Power-cables-1-145-kV/LV-power-cables-1-kV/Aluminium-cables/AXQ---TXXI33835.html
aj4000@reddit
It was Rupert Murdoch. If people have fast internet then they can stream their content and will cancel their overpriced Foxtel subscriptions because they won't need them anymore. Tony Abbott had his head so far up Rupert's ass that when Rupe told him to gut Kevin Rudd's original NBN plans he obeyed. Malcolm Turnbull was communications minister at the time and tried to sell it by telling us that "Australians don't need any more than 25Mbps".
fresh-dork@reddit
for long runs like that, i'd rather just use fiber. no such thing as ground differential or induced current from lightning
udsd007@reddit
We went from long Ethernet runs to long fiber runs at our state government agency’s many remote sites (9 division HQs, + 77 county sites, all of them with multiple buildings) because of ground potential differences associated with storms and lightning. Here in Oklahoma, that’s a real and serious issue, and we were spending upwards of $20K/year on fried gear replacements. Fiber solved it cheaply and well.
ol-gormsby@reddit
Ground differential is definitely a thing. IBM wouldn't certify our depot until all buildings were compliant with earthing.
xyzzytwistymaze@reddit
This - grounding and Bonding are important as well as surge protection.
SumoNinja17@reddit
We had multiple floors of offices. When we needed more staff, we would furnish a floor and have coax cables run. We'd set up PC's and fire them up, and someone's computer on another floor would go down.
This happened several times, until we realized the network cards had programmable addresses. If there were 2 the same, the second one to boot up kicked the first one off-line.
There was a lot of fuckery afoot when people figured out what was going on. We had to break down all the PC's and catalogue the network card addresses, and toggle dip switches until they were all unique.
Then we learned about "terminal ends".
Luckily, I still drank back then.
udsd007@reddit
We got a few pallets of IBM desktops back in 1990-ish, with the same MAC address on every damn NIC. They went out to our 9 division HQs and 77 county highway maintenance sites. Many sites got two or three, and the division HQs got about a dozen. Non-hilarity ensued.
When we finally figured out just W T Effing Efff was happy, we instituted a local MAC addressing protocol: local MAC for a computer would start with 40 Division number CC for the county 1-77), and end with the last N digits of the serial number, for some fixed N.
My GOD, the difference it made in debugging network problems. “What machine is At X IP address?” Ping it, see the MAC, and there you are!
Feyr@reddit
hah! the whole 3com debacle. fun times all around!
speddie23@reddit (OP)
When I was in high school we still had networks that used coax.
The students used to steal the 75-ohm terminators (and hence being down that segment) so much they ended up supergluing them to the T connectors.
jeffrey_f@reddit
In the days of 10 and 100MB ethernet, the company I worked at had a wireless bridge between the "office" and the sattelite location 2 blocks away, which just so happened to be line-of-sight. It wasn't speedy, but it did work for what we needed.
speddie23@reddit (OP)
So back when I was still at home, we had 256/64k ASDL with no WiFi. The ADSL was down one end of the house and my room the other.
I Frankensteined a long network cable by literally getting a few smaller network cables, untwisting the pairs on the ends and joining them by twisting the copper and covering in electrical tape.
This cable was probably made of 6 smaller cables.
If I ran it at 100mb/s full duplex, it would kinda work, but the retransmits were crazy high. Of course, due to cable that was wildly out of spec.
Somehow I worked out to force it to 10mb/s (can't remember if half or full duplex, I think half), it would work.
jack_o_all_trades@reddit
Or as a marketer would say. You ran a test installation, you wanted to save the cost of an electrician if it hadn't worked.
novaru@reddit
You'd think a garden variety cable could be buried in a garden, honest mistake!
I'll see myself out, thank you.
forbinwasright@reddit
Comments like this are the root of the issue You plant your opinions and the conversation goes into the weeds. This is no way to cultivate a committee.
Wait, let go of me stop it. I'll leave quietly.
DogPlow@reddit
At least they settled with running ethernet in the end. Wireless would totally work but it might involve some Yagis for point-to-point between the buildings with even more restrictions and licensing. Thankfully fiber adoption later has removed most of those cursed setups of the past.
fresh-dork@reddit
well at least there's a happy ending
Nu-Hir@reddit
See, what you did here was a proof of concept. You were just proving that it would work before they spent all of that money getting it done properly.
djdaedalus42@reddit
More than your job was worth, mate.