Don't worry about insulting me Mojo, I'm not actually the guy out doing the work but I'm involved from many other angles.
I am curious though, would you consider your above advice solid in the Telecom world for outdoor purposes? I can't imagine trying to solder effectively while hanging from a pole during the rain or snow in order to attach two wires together.
This would have been the area where I was referring to? I work for Bell-Aliant, an income trust Telco tied to Bell Canada. Together we cover over 50% of Canada and I know that soldering is not used anywhere to join loops, feeder, distribution pairs etc. in the outdoor environments. Indoors there are generally patch panels so it becomes less of an issue.
Certainly solder is better but I am curious if standards in your area are so much better than ours. Also by "data Circuits", I would be referring to old school technologies like frame relay, datapac, etc. Not really 'high speed" depending on your standards. However, we certainly don't solder our copper pairs outdoors for ADSL service up to 10MB either. Anything faster than that is fiber.
We also found our most sensitive circuits to poor crimps were ones where radio stations relayed their remote broadcasts to their transmitting stations via our copper data lines but using analogue (not really data, but using data groomed copper.) This is still not comparable to a home environment as it involves long distances and other factors.
I agree with everything you said from a technical standpoint. However, because you seemed to feel so strongly about it, I would really like to understand if our standards are that far behind that of your geography's. It's an efficiency vs. quality thing for sure.
Also since I mentioned my company name, none of my post, in any way, reflects the views of my company or is in any way, representative of my company. and what ever else goes into the usual disclaimer clause.....
