In 25 years telephony has changed. I have a couple of grey boxes for copper wire telephones, and these are unsightly, unused, and in the way of a new amateur radio antenna coaxial cable box.

I see warning stickers on the boxes. One stated 100 volts, iirc.

What is the proper safe way to eliminate the wires and boxes?

Just a heads up: Last unused utility box I opened had a big wasp nest in it. They seemed happy where they were, so I left them alone. Until January.

the 100 V is the ringing voltage.

You may not remove the box yourself.

It is the property of the telco and they have done things like taken into consideration what happens if there is a nearby lightning strike etc.

In some localities there are building code and/or NEC considerations as well.

But the best answer is that it is not yours and you are not authorized to remove it.

It might be interesting to ask Verizon and hear what their canned response might be.

In my case, and I think most of C&P -> Bell Atlantic -> Verizon territory, when they moved from copper/central office distribution to fiber optic, they installed an ONT (Optical Network Termination) box and retained the old-style smaller gray box to tie into the existing in-house phone wiring. Part of the ONT is an ATA (Analog Telephony Adapter) that turns POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) used by old-style phone sets into VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service.

If you still have a "land line" from Verizon removing the small box will disconnect your in-house wired phone sets. Removing the larger ONT box will disconnect all Verizon-provided services (Internet, TV, etc.)

Posting a photo of the equipment in question could be helpful. Also a summary of the services you are getting from Verizon FIOS (or Frontier in some areas of Western VA).

As implied by radioman above, a lighting strike brought to your house along the copper wires to the street is a threat not to be ignored. If Verizon does agree to remove the box, insist that they remove the old copper distribution cable as well.

As far as legality goes, you do not own the box, but rather than removing the box from your house, perhaps you could remove your house from the box.

Need to remove the right bottom Bell Atlantic and the center open door box.

Also need to remove all the excess CATV coax!

The only service I receive is Verizon FiOS.

Looks like the white co-ax cables route to various parts of the house where there may be a co-ax "outlet/drops" to connect a TV. Probably left over from some disconnected cable TV provider. These should be easy to trace, and if this is correct, they can be removed. The box in the middle with the open door could be part of Verizon's fiber optic termination (the main ONT is the big box on the left), I have never seen Verizon install two boxes for FIOS, but if so, you can't disconnect this without losing FIOS. OTOH, this could also be part of the former co-ax cable system. The spring-loaded terminals shown in the photo scream "telephone" to me. The single white twisted pair cable coming out the bottom may be your FIOS land line.

The small box on the right below the electrical meter is the legacy telco interface, if you have a land line as part of your FIOS service, this is necessary. If you can trace a twisted pair cable from this to a working inside telephone set, it is probably necessary to retain it. You could also open it up on the customer (left) side and unplug various RJ-11 jacks inside to see if your inside phone(s) stop giving dial tone (take a photo of the connections, and/or label the wires first).

The FIOS ONTs I have observed can deliver signal to your indoor router/TV set-top box (STB) via either a co-ax cable or 100baseT ethernet. This is configured by Verizon, you cannot change it, but they usually will for the asking. Sometimes use of the ethernet is tied to a higher cost plan. The latest round of mandatory STB "upgrades" seem to use ethernet for all TV services, streaming from Verizon servers. It appears that the blue cable coming out of the ONT is ethernet to you inside equipment. OTOH, there may be a co-ax cable running inside the PVC down pipe, and coming up near where your inside FIOS equipment is placed before entering the house.

You should also have a power distribution unit inside the home, probably near the electric panel that is fed by the meter in the photo. There will be a low-voltage circuit back to the outside equipment to power it. This can be a simple insulated wire pair, or I have also seen co-ax used for this.

I still think contacting Verizon and asking them if they will relocate their devices to your requirements is worthwhile. I just hope some vandal doesn't come along with a chain saw and causes this to be a necessity.

Thank you architect. The WiFi is fed by Cat 6 ethernet, direct from the NIC. The WiFi router has two ethernet back to the TV and AppleTV, to run those as wired connections rather than WiFi. There is also a coax to the TV as backup. And, a coax from the WiFi router up to the attic, for backhaul to another WAP, if needed.

With the 25-year old home having copper wire for various phone jacks, and CAT 5(?) running to those same jacks, I think I could dispense with the copper wire connections indoors. But, it may be best to at least have an interface for copper wire phones indoors available. Some of those old folk phones with text displays require both copper and ethernet to work, and the next homeowner may want to use such a phone.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: 4MUL8R,

The "copper wire" you report running to your phone jacks is usually called "Cat 2" he stanadard used for decades for telephony. It might work for 10baseT ethernet, but nothing higher speed. I was unaware that those text telephones used both POTS and IP network connections to function, I assumed they were simply SIP/VoIP phones. I wouldn't worry about leaving anything in place on the chance that it might be needed later, you are not going to get a discount should a future provider needs to pull new cables.

I would not remove any of the twisted pairs whether cat 2 or cat 5, but it sounds like the co-ax is fair game. I still recommend disconnecting before actually removing the cables so as to confirm that everything you want keeps working.

Also, it looks like some of your cables are routed underground. If you remove any of these make sure you put a pull cord in the conduits (tie the pull cord to the cable end).

While you are doing all this tracing work, it would not hurt to put labels on the cables, and/or the jacks so the next time you have to mess with it you won't have to do it over again.

We were putting a window in where a wall was for our new kitchen and right in the middle of that future window space was an old telephone demarc box. It took a while of getting sent from provider to provider as no one seemed to know who owned it and was responsible for it. Finally found out it was a company called Windstream and they sent a guy in a truck to remove the overhead telephone line to it and the box itself. There was an ancient telephone in our basement that looked to be mid-1970's vintage and the sticker on the bottom said the local telephone company was "Conestoga" which I guess was part of Bell Telephone.

The bonus was he told us we had fiber on our pole and ended up getting fiber internet for a while from them.