I was a teenager in the 90s, so I was on the phone constantly. Sometimes I could hear someone else’s phone call on my phone while I was talking to someone.
Sometimes they could hear it too, sometimes not. And I do recall this happening to my friends sometimes as well.
And how often could someone else hear my conversation?
In: Engineering
I’m an ex GPO telephone engineer.
Many reasons for this.
Telephone lines used to be wired in a cable known as “3 pair” which has 3 pairs or wires, usually all 3 pairs come to your house and are terminated at your main socket. You only need one pair for your telephone line to work.
It’s not uncommon, to save time by using the spare wires in your line to wire a second line ie your neighbours using the same cable. This can create cross chatter as the signal can cross to the other pair in the wire. There’s no shielding.
Another reason could be the engineer double jumpered it at the distribution point accidentally. The jumper cables used to be so brittle and snap on the breakout bar so lazy people would jumper over the top, another way of getting cross chatter
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