Jeremy Songne’s 11-year project finally came to an end last week.Songne, telecommunications manager, has been working for more than a decade to replace all of the dial-tone telephone cables on campus. The engineer is in charge of making sure each building on campus is Internet-Protocol enabled when it is built.And on July 2, Songne finished with the last of the cable replacements.Songne said he replaced about two to three main cables a year during the 11-year period, with the total length of cable equaling somewhere around 5 miles.”We had 10 main cables and countless offsets from those cables, and those cables were tied to each other over the years because of repairs,” Songne said. “We had a total of 11,700 phones that were tied to those 10 cables.”Sheri Thompson, IT planning and communications officer, said the University chose not to replace all of the cables at once because the cost would have been too high.”It was going to cost millions of dollars to replace it all, and that just wasn’t going to be happening,” Thompson said. “It’s been part of life-cycle replacement of the cable as it needed to come out.”Thompson said the University has been able to replace the cables as more money has come in for “associated construction costs.””It’s been a happy coincidence that we’ve been able to replace it as opposed to purposely going out and replacing it,” Thompson said.The old cables, encased in lead and insulated with paper, were put in place as early as the 1940s.The new cables are covered in vinyl and filled with petroleum jelly to keep individual wires in the cables separated.”It’s got all kinds of color-coded wires, so the engineers know exactly what wire goes to what thing,” Thompson said. “It’s kind of pretty actually.”The newer, thicker cables are much better suited for harsh weather conditions, Songne said. He said there was a possibility of the old cables malfunctioning during bad rainstorms.”About six years ago we had an outage that lasted two weeks because the damage was that extensive because of a rainstorm,” Songne said. “It’s just really more reliable.”Despite some troubles with rain, Songne said the cables suffered minimal damage during Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Gustav.He said the last major problem he had with the cables came with the rainstorm that happened six years ago.”We had been repairing them for about five years at that time,” Songne said. “Since then we’ve stepped up our efforts to make sure that didn’t happen again. That was kind of a motivation.”Air machines were put in place in the early 1980s to constantly blow air through the cables to keep the paper lining dry.The machines, nicknamed “Frankenstein” and “Godzilla” by Songne and his crew, blew five pounds of air per square inch in the cables at all times to keep the paper in the cables dry.”You have to remember that telephone lines are underground, and we live in a swamp,” Thompson said. “I think they’re just turned off now, and they’re no longer taking power away from the University. We’re saving some energy that way.”
 
 
 
 
—–Contact Robert Stewart at [email protected]