3 relays/doorphones, and a router

One of the easiest jobs to do is coming behind a professional wiring tech / company who knows what they are doing. Unfortunately my job work order did not have the switch that this company needed on it, but they have not yet moved in when I completed this so it was OK for the time being. 

I had to connect 3 door relays to the newly prewired office wiring. I also had to mount and install my SRP router (which is not only a dual WAN router with 4 GB LAN ports, but it also provides WiFi, 2 USB ports, and 4 FXS and 1 FXO analog ports.)

SRP router patched in to jacks. (middle = cisco)
3 Viking RC2A relays installed (top left)

The guy who installed the low voltage wiring
removed the guts from an e20b door phone and
mounted it inside this multi tenant door phone!
Pretty awesome Idea, have to give respect to
Real Secure for coming up with that idea. 

This is the e20b that I installed to the existing wiring. 

4 doorbells/relays, overhead paging and a SPA 8000

Had a pretty decent sized job at a voulenteer ambulance location recently. Took a little longer than I had originally anticipated, but when I did the original walkthrough I had an assistant that I was going to have go around and do the simpiler tasks, such as connecting and mounting the 15 or so VoIP phones while I focused on the more technical aspects of the job.

Unfortunately when the job finally was scheduled to be complete my assistant's employment had been terminated, and once again I was left as the only man standing to get the job completed on my own. 

Originally I anticipated the job to take a day to a day and a half to complete. It actually took about 3 or 4 trips to this customer to complete the job. Granted, 2 of those visits were not full days, because of scheduling restraints involving the customer, as well as other customers requiring service calls. 

The phones were installed and mounted within a day - including several CAT5 runs that were terminated with RJ11 jacks that needed to be converted over to CAT5 jacks. 

The most difficult portion of this job was to trace back and figure out the original existing wiring going to each door phone and door release. With the wiring being connected to power transformers, and the PBX station ports it was not possible to use the tracer tone to trace them back. Everything had to be physically traced back to the PBX relays, and confirmed/tested that they worked. This wasted a good part of a day just to isolate, and verify the wiring prior to even being able to replace the existing equiptment with the new equiptment. 2 Hours were also lost when allegedly a transformer was burned out while attempting to trace the wiring back, although I did not locate a burnt out transformer (the original wiring guys came in over the weekend and resolved that issue) Since I do not know the cause, or even timing of the power loss for 2 CCTV cameras and a door keypad I can not accept responsibility for them failing, as they may have stopped working prior to my even begining to work, or they could have been burned out due to some other action from someone else in the building. Stranger things have happened, and when I returned after those issues were resolved I did not see any of the transformers replaced.

When you encounter something like this
 it takes time to identify everything
so that you do not effect any other systems
UTI-1 installed (black box in center)
4 RC2A relays installed (bottom right)

The existing PBX is still in service for a small portion of the building, and may remain as a back up in the event of a failure of their VoIP system - while they do have multiple internet connections, they are on completely physically isolated networks, and not set up on a multi WAN router as fail over. There are also many other systems that come together in this room, such as their card access systems and CCTV systems, so removing and cleaning up the mess that existed prior to my start at this job was not an option, as it would have consumed too much time, and could have had an adverse effect on many of the other systems that this location depends upon, and as stated earlier, it is a voulenteer ambulance garage, so many of the systems are critical.

Here is a close up of the 4 RC2A relay devices
for the door phones/releases. 

The good thing is that I was able to mount the relays fairly neatly, compared to how most of the other systems wiring was done.

The networking guy just had their router and switch sitting on a shelf
in all of this mess. The SPA8000 was installed here.
This provides analog lines for the 4 door phone, overhead paging,
as well as 2 analog extensions on the VoIP hosted PBX system. 

Why the data network is shoved on a shelf in a spaghetti of wiring and not in a rack enclosure is beyond me, but this is how it was wired, and this is how the route and switch was set up before I got here. So I just installed my SPA 8000 above the network equiptment on this shelf. 

Also installed are 2 PoE injectors for 2 VoIP phones that were wall mounted. 

The UTI-1 connects their overhead paging system to one of the analog ports on the SPA8000 to allow paging thru the VoIP system. The existing PBX was not removed from the amplifier, and is still capable of accessing the paging system on a different input of the PA amp.

One of the exterior door phones.

Another exterior door phone. 

The 2 interior door phones were not photographed, but are the same model as shown above - Viking e20b

PRISIM, Room 641a, Licence plate readers, facial recognition, CCTV and more..

One of the first posts that I created way back when this website / blog was merely in its infancy stages, and just a small blog on my now defunct Yahoo profile, and finally moved over to this blog on its inauguration had to do with government surveillance of your communications. It provided the names for many past and present government surveillance programs and links (mostly Wikipedia) for further reading and research about each of the listed surveillance programs. The original post can be viewed [HERE]

One of the biggest ones that sticks out at the present time with all of the talk about this "new" program that was just leaked to the public PRISIM, was the mention of Room 641a. The information about room 641a was migrated over to this site in 2009 when This website went live, but was published a year or two prior when Yahoo still had blogs available as part of their profiles.

Room 641a was first publicly exposed in 2006 by a former AT&T technician who worked in the building. It is one of the only confirmed locations where fiber optic splitters are installed in one of the backbones of the internet where the NSA sucks up ALL of the internet traffic passing thru this point. Other locations are believed to exist throught the country at most, if not all of the major internet hubs.

Fastforward to this week, and information is slowly starting to trickle out about this program called PRISIM. It sounds like it is very closely related to the survallance taking place in Room 641a, and many other similar rooms all across the country/world. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to remain private and/or anonymous in the world that we live in. ALL of our communications are monitored, wether they mearly collect data on who we call, when we call them, what our web histories are - or if all of the content is actullay being recorded and stored (think ECHELON)

If you do not believe that they are able to obtain much information to you - check this out... https://latitude.google.com/latitude/b/0?hl=en  Especially if you have an android phone, Google is capable of tracking and mapping your every move. Google is allegedly a private company (and not a government front company) so if they are capable of maintaing these kinds of records about you and your movements, immagine what kind of data the government has aggitated about your communications and daily movements.

Cameras are a daily part of life, especially in larger cities where you will be caught on CCTV cameras pretty much from the time you leave your home until the time you return to your home. They are everywhere, private businesses, transportation systems, toll booths, police cars, and light posts to name a few. Licence plate reader software is fairly common, and relitively inexpensive. NYS actually changed their licence plates to make it easier for their licence plate software to identify your licence plate much easier. So even without a physical tracking device on your person, or on your car (just incase you leave your cell phone home for the day, or your battery dies) and if you have an older car that does not have a built in tracking system (like onStar, or LoJack) they are still able to track your movements with traffic cameras, and cameras mounted to police vehicles.

Thinking taking the bus or train will be able to reduce or eliminate their ability to track you? Think again! Many public busses, and transit systems have vast CCTV systems in place and facial recognition software has come leaps and bounds over the past few years. Just check out any of the more advanced photo editing software available. For example Picasa, which will automatically identify and tag people that you have taken photographs of. It is extremely accurate, and will often even tag people regardless of the age they were when the photo was taken - aging does not greatly effect the results of these systems, and this is just what the public has access to. In the past the government has usually been about 10 years ahead of the public with the technology that is available to them, so just imagine how accurate the facial recognition software that the government has access to is.

Ongoing Optimum / Cablevision fiasco..

[UPDATE: 6.22.13 They called me one time after I advised them to stop calling me on my cell phone since I am "not authorized" I filed a complaint with the FTC about this call that was made AFTER I told them to stop calling my cell phone. Since then they no longer made attempts to call my cell phone, although I have not heard anything from the FTC yet. But the main reason of this update is that I can NOT recommend Virgin mobile as a wired internet connection replacement, the service is just to sporadic, even with a 40% WiMax signal, it works when it wants.

[UPDATE: Several hours after this blog entery and the back and fourth on twitter occured my account was suspended for "non-payment". I can almost certanly claim that this was the cause of that effect. I currently switched to a 4G internet soloution, while not providing me with the speed I am acustom to, it seems to be able to handle much of what I use the internet for. Just working on setting up the ICS to share the connection with my wired LAN]

I take to twitter often to call out companies when I feel that I have been wronged by their policies, or actions. Occasionally I immortalize the interactions with them, and my disputes on this blog. Today is no different, other than the intended target of my dissatisfaction.

Working in the telecommunications industry, I can tell you that usually Optimum / Cablevision is usually the best ISP / cable provider to deal with as far as customer service is concerned. Time Warner Cable's customer service is just atrocious. Their rates are generally better than their competitors, and the available speed for their internet is hard to beat, especially in a similar price bracket. These are usually the complaints that I see about Optimum on the internet, however my experiences personally, and professionally being in the telecom industry are generally positive with this company.

So... If my experiences have been generally positive with Optimum, then why am I here publishing a blog post about the ongoing fiasco with them? Well Let me go back to November 2011 where the first seeds for this fiasco started.

In November of 2011 my (now ex) wife moved upstate to help her father settle into his new life after the passing of her mother. The services were in her name, but I have always been authorized to make any changes to the account. I can not recall if it was prior to this or not but at some point all services were suspended EXCEPT internet services.

After I was the only resident of my home, I eventually, WITHOUT my (now ex) wife's "authorization" turned back the television and telephone services to get a triple play package once again. Had I not been authorized, how could they allow me personally, and with out speaking with the "account holder" authorize the ADDITION of additional services which would increase the monthly bill?

As of October 2012 I was divorced, and my wife had moved to some backwoods hick state somewhere in middle America.

Sometime afterwards I attempted to have the account ownership change, however Optimum's policy requires a signature from the account holder, which is impossible to acquire being as I do not know the physical location of said account holder, nor do I care to know. Even if I did, it would be impossible to obtain said signature.

So the account continues on, with me supposedly still "authorized" on the account, and her no where to be seen or found. Remarried from what I am aware.

In the beginning few months of 2013 I decided to switch from a prepaid cell phone to a contract for two reasons. First I wanted LTE which was difficult to come by with most prepaid carriers, and secondly, I wanted the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. This increased my monthly cellular bill by about 50%. So in an effort to find ways to cut other bills in order to find the money to pay this increased bill with out reducing the amount of discretionary funds available to me on a monthly basis I had to look around and what my current expenses were, and where cuts could be made.

Being that I pretty much NEVER use the Optimum voice service, and have Ooma, VoIP from my job, a cell phone, and Google voice (as well as other communications means to contact people via the PSTN) this was just a redundant service and not a necessity.

Further examination showed that I rarely watched much television, and when I did it was usually in the middle of the night, and almost always interrupted by the stupid updates that they felt the need to push to my box, not to mention how disappointing the cloud DVR service is (no live rewind, failure to record many of the shows scheduled, etc.) So this was another service that I had little use for, especially at the cost. The television service cost more than the internet service did, which is the only service I really got much use out of. Lets not forget that I got a notice informing me that my promotional period was expiring, and not only would my rates increase, they were also going to add an additional fee for sports programming, of which I watch absolutely ZERO! The kicker, they said this was not only for channels such as ESPN, etc, but also broadcast television stations such as FOX, that I could get for FREE with an antenna connected to my televisions!

History lesson over. Now we come to trying to cancel television and telephone services. I first call them up, and so far things are going ok until they ask me my name. I always remain honest with them. They tell me I can not cancel because I am not authorized. Funny thing, that. They always accepted my payments, they always allowed me to call in for repair tickets, AND they allowed me to ADD ADDITIONAL SERVICES!!! Now If I am not authorized, how did they allow all of this to occur? And at what time was my authorization to my own account revoked?

Several phone calls later, always the same results. Eventually they told me something that had me fall off my chair splitting my sides in complete hysteria. I could supposedly have the disconnect department cancel my entire account, and then open an account in my own name. WTF!? How can I cancel an ENTIRE account if I am not authorized, if they will not allow me to do a downgrade, or partial disconnect?

At least another month passes, and I try again. This time I figure if I log into the account online and chat with a rep, they will see that I am logged into the account, and therefore must be authorized. But NO! Same run around. This all happens, and I am always referred to call some number, which department always seems to be closed when I am available to waste several hours of my life with these people.

So now what to do? Well I am waiting for them to disconnect my services for non-payment, of which is already over $400 - of which a majority are NOT AUTHORIZED by me, since I have advised them many times to cancel ALL services EXCEPT OOL with boost +! As they have already been advised, I also plan on disputing ALL past charges to my account from November 2011, when the "authorized" account holder no longer resided at this address. This should provide me with plenty of reserve cash.

While I wait for my arch nemesis to string fiber down my block (they already have around the corner, and up the block done) I will just replace my OOL service with either LTE or WiMAX, while it will not provide the bandwidth that I desire, it should suffice for a majority of my internet needs, and I can always set up something at a co-lo if I require cloud apps that need extra bandwidth instead of hosting them locally.