Phone Line Basics:

Back in 1996 I wrote an article for Radio Guide entitled "Phone Line Basics", which
attempted to explain audio connectivity through the phone system. At the same time I
placed a reprint of the article on our web site. Almost immediately I began to find links into
the article from all over the world. After six years it is still the most popular article on our
site. One of our competitors even asked if they could place the article on their web site. As it
turns out, it is not easy to find accurate information about the phone system available in
condensed form.

Accurate is a key word here because many of the articles I found while searching the web
were filled with opinions and speculation as to how the phone system works. Condensed is
another key word because, lets face it, nobody wants to look through binders of telecom
specs. Much of what was outlined in the article had to do with getting audio in and out of
proprietary phone systems. Yes, I said proprietary, as in little or no published information.
So when Ray asked me to consider writing for Radio Guide, I immediately suggested an
update to "Phone Line Basics". I'll warn you right now, this is not a primer on ISDN protocols
or the latest coding algorithms. This article addresses the most popular phone line
configuration, the one at your next remote, press conference, or hotel room.

PBX Telephone Lines

Every engineer has had to deal with telephone lines at one time or another. If the
application is in your studio, you can take your time and make some calls to determine the
right equipment to buy and the correct phone line configuration to order. Out on the road
it's a different story. Many offices and stores have installed low cost electronic PBX (Private
Branch Exchange) or Key telephone systems.

The terms "PBX" and "Key" both refer to hardware that enables several telephones to be
connected to a smaller number of telephone lines. The term "Key" is now used to describe
any small system but it was originally used to describe the manual keys or push-buttons on
systems like the 1A series Key telephone. Today's "Key" systems are more like small PBXs
with programmable features such as distinctive ringing, hunt groups, and automatic line
selection. A PBX consists of a switch box and punch block located where the telephone lines
come into the building. Special telephones are connected point-to-point back to the PBX
punch block.

Electronic PBX wiring is typically 4 to 8 wires using RJ-11 or RJ-45 modular telephone jacks.
These are not standard telephone wires. Even a simple analog PBX line does not look like a
standard phone line. On an electronic PBX, two wires are often used as control lines, which
send keypress data to the PBX, and ringer and LED data back to the phone. This control
information is required to set up or answer a call. In many cases, the tones you hear when
you dial a number are there for your own feedback. The "real" digits are sent as data bits to
the PBX which completes the call.

Dry Pair

The voice path on an analog PBX is typically referred to as a dry pair. Dry refers to the lack of
DC current or ring voltage found on regular phone lines. If you can get access to this audio
channel, you can use the telephone base to select, dial, and put calls on hold. This gives you
multi-line call handling with audio on one pair. In other words, you can have a multi-line
studio phone system without the high cost.

The downside is the proprietary nature of the PBX. Do not expect any support from your
phone system manufacturer, in fact they will probably warn against tampering. Also,
proprietary means they can make changes without telling you, so any documentation you
find may already be outdated. This type of hacking should obviously be left to an engineer
who is comfortable with telephone equipment and willing to deal with potential warranty
problems.

The digital PBX is not as friendly. Here the voice is digitized right at the handset and sent
back as data to the PBX. You do not have access to this voice path. Luckily, most PBX
installations still provide an outside line for use with fax machines and modems, and of
course your remote broadcast console.

ISDN is just one protocol for a digital PBX. In fact you can have individual ISDN lines that go
all the way back to the phone company, or ISDN lines that go to a PBX system within your
building. There are a wide variety of ISDN CODECs that allow you to send studio quality
audio over the phone line, but as I mentioned earlier, that's a different article.

Analog Phone Lines

The term "outside line" refers to a direct connection to the telephone line outside of the
building, also referred to as an "analog line", or "POTS line" (Plain Old Telephone Service), in
other words a standard residence type phone line. The POTS line is the line you will need for
your remote broadcast console, telephone hybrid, analog telephone, cordless telephone,
fax machine, or modem. The POTS line consists of two wires called tip and ring. These two
wires provide DC current to power the telephone electronics, AC current to ring the
telephone bell or electronic ringer, and a full duplex balanced voice path.

This is a closed loop, balanced system not referenced to earth ground. The POTS phone line,
with all phones on-hook, should measure around 48 volts DC. Taking a phone off-hook
creates a DC signal path across the pair, which is detected as loop current back at the
central office. This drops the voltage measured at the phone down to about 3 to 9 volts. An
off-hook telephone typically draws about 15 to 20 milliamps of DC current to operate, at a
DC resistance around 180 ohms. The remaining voltage drop occurs over the copper wire
path and over the telephone company circuits. These circuits provide from 200 to 400 ohms
of series resistance to protect from short circuits and decouple the audio signals.

To ring your telephone, the phone company momentarily applies a 90 VRMS, 20 Hz AC

signal to the line. Even with a thousand ohms of line resistance, this can still pack a bit of a
shock so be careful when you are probing around trying to find a POTS line.

Why the primer on telephone lines? The world of communications is certainly changing but
there are still millions of analog telephones, cordless telephones, fax machines, and
modems that use POTS line. Even though the POTS line has been around for years, its old
technology is still misunderstood by many engineers. Lets face it, unless you are a telecom
circuit designer, there isn't much coverage of "old" technology in schools, publications, or
journals.

POTS Line Characteristics

Bandwidth: 180 Hz to 3.2 kHz.

The low end is rolled off early to stay away from the 60 Hz region. Also, telecom isolation
and hybrid transformers would be much more bulky, (and expensive) if they had to carry
signals down to 20 Hz.

The high end cut off is more critical. Voice on the telephone network is digitized at 8 kHz
sampling rate which means that any signal above 4 kHz will be aliased back as noise in the
voice band. Most voice CODECs roll off at about -25dB at 4 kHz with a -3dB down point
around 3.2 kHz. The phone company decided years ago that the 180 Hz to 3.2 kHz range
would be sufficient for speech intelligibility while allowing them to multiplex many calls over
coax and twisted pair.

Signal to Noise: Approximately 45 dB.

This is not as easy to quantify because noise comes in many forms, such as electrical
interference from fluorescent fixtures or hiss from the many amplifier stages in the voice
path.
Speech correlated noise can be introduced from non-linear speech coding and compression
algorithms. Crosstalk from other conversations is another form of noise. The phone
company uses 8 bit mulaw nonlinear coding which yields about 12 bits of dynamic range.
The bottom line is that you can never count on more than about 45 dB signal to noise ratio.

Signal Levels: -9 dBm average speech across tip/ring.

Speech peaks out to +4 dBm can be measured at the phone, but anything over 0dBm at the
central office will be clipped. The FCC requires that all telephone audio interconnect
equipment limit speech to -9dBm, averaged over 3 seconds. Consult FCC Part 68
requirements for all the details.

Hybrids and Telephones

The signal on a tip/ring pair is full duplex, balanced bi-directional audio. This design allows
signals to travel for miles without expensive shielding by using common mode rejection to
remove noise that is induced onto both wires. In order to send and receive audio through
the pair you must use a two wire to four wire hybrid circuit which converts the pair into
separate transmit and receive audio paths. Bulky and expensive hybrid transformers have
been replaced in most telephones by ICs which perform the same function. Whether it is a
transformer or IC, the hybrid must provide at least 1500 volt isolation and surge suppression
from lightning strikes.

Commercial hybrid couplers provide familiar audio connections for full duplex transmit and
receive audio. The primary difference between couplers is the amount of trans-hybrid loss
or echo from the hybrid. When you send audio into a hybrid, some of the audio leaks back
into the receive audio mixed with the caller's voice. The amount of return leakage depends
on the type of hybrid and how well it matches the characteristics of the phone line.

Within a telephone, the biggest contributor to poor audio quality is the handset
microphone. Keep in mind this low cost microphone element is designed to survive years of
close proximity spitting and shouting as well as the occasional drop to the floor. The result is
a sturdy element that has considerable distortion, a jagged response curve, and substantial
dynamic compression. Beyond the microphone, most telephones perform well on a wide
variation of telephone line conditions.

There are a wide variety of audio couplers called Handset Interfaces that replace the
handset of a telephone to provide send and receive audio. These interfaces work with
analog telephones as well as digital PBX telephones.
Analog Line Survival?

Strangely enough, fax machines and modems will keep analog lines available even in
buildings with ISDN and digital PBXs. In addition, data transmission is less tolerant of
compression algorithms, line noise, and distortion, so the phone company must keep this in
mind when considering further "squishing" of voice channels or loosening of transmission
equipment tolerances.