Dan from Commerce City writes, “What's driving you crazy? At the RTD Park and Ride at the corner of 104th and Revere St sits a pole about 3 feet off the ground with what looks like a stock pot attached to it. There is no indication of what it is or used for other than some official looking numbers on the pot. If you go up to Tower East on 104th and then go north on Tower there is another cookpot on a post on the west side of the road. They are driving me crazy, is the city cooking crab legs or what?”
I can verify that if you stop by that pot to bring home dinner, you will go home hungry.
I went up to the park and ride on 104th Ave. hoping to find a pot full of Louisiana seafood boil, but found something not as exciting. It is as you described — an oval container that looks just like a large pot with a lid on top right next to the bus shelter. It rests on a triangular shelf that is secured to a 3x3 wood post with a thick, round black cord coming out of the bottom that runs into the ground. Inside are several Teltrend T1 Intelligent Line Repeaters. It is described in its manual as “a protected, bidirectional T1 line repeater with bidirectional loop back and powering capabilities designed to facilitate maintenance and testing from either end of a T1 span line.” There isn’t anything else in the can.
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The company Teltrend Inc. designs, manufactures and markets a range of transmission products for telecommunications companies and offers products for use in voice and data services by telephone companies. According to the company website, Teltrend Inc. also provide supply, engineering, installation and maintenance services for end-to-end communications solutions (via Fiber or Wireless Radio), last mile network access, PBX, CCTV solutions and telephone trading systems. Nearby, there is a fiber optic cable cover pole owned by MCI, now a division of Verizon, but I could not tell if the two are connected or not.
When I asked the Commerce City traffic engineering department your question, a representative told me that the silver canister is part of a communication system for either a fiber network, cable or phone company. The person I talked to wasn't sure exactly which company owns and maintains it because there is no identification on the apparatus. No one else in the office knew any more than that.
This is just one design of many styles of outdoor networking cabinets that protect phone, cable or other networking wires and switches and repeaters used in and around traffic signals. I looked though several catalogs of these enclosures and never found a new one that looks quite like the stockpot.
However, a retired telephone rep tech wrote to me saying, he confirms this is a T1 repeater.
"They typically are placed around every 4000 feet to maintain the constant data signal for all different applications. The end user may be anywhere on that particular copper cable run," he said.
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