1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to telephone wiring interchange equipment, and more particularly, to apparatus adapted to slidingly receive and support a plurality of telephone jacks upon a telephone wiring interchange panel.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Within businesses, offices, apartment complexes and other locations where a number of telephone lines are clustered together telephone service is typically provided via a central telephone interchange wiring panel installed at the site of the business, office, apartment complex, etc.. Often, an underground trunk cable is routed to the wiring panel, and the interconnection between the trunk cable and the individual telephone lines is made upon the wiring panel. Individual telephone line wires are routed from the wiring panel to each telephone in use at the site.
Presently, wiring interconnections are typically made upon the telephone interchange wiring panel through the use of so-called punch down blocks, also known as terminal boards. These devices, supplied by American Telephone & Telegraph Company and others, provide multiple rows of wire gripping terminals housed in a plastic base unit, the wire gripping terminals being adapted to releasably grasp and retain the stripped ends of telephone wires. Depending upon the specific model of the terminal board in use, all of the terminals within any given row may be shorted together by a common bus bar. Such terminal boards are either fastened directly to a back panel or are releasably supported by plastic mounting brackets secured to such a back panel.
Usually, four separate color-coded wires are routed to the terminal board from the main trunk line for each telephone line to be served at the site. The four separate wires are typically connected to four successive rows of terminals upon the terminal board. Another set of four color-coded wires is connected to the aforementioned four successive rows of terminals, and this second set of four wires is routed to a telephone at the site. Whenever new service is to be established for a new telephone line, old service is to be disconnected for an existing telephone line, or a user assigned to a particular telephone line wants to relocate the telephone line to a different office or location at the site, a telephone service man must go to the wiring panel, locate the four rows of terminals assigned to the pertinent telephone line, and either connect, disconnect or move the four wires upon the terminal board corresponding to the effected telephone line.
In order to minimize the time required by the serviceman to make such wiring changes at the wiring panel, it has been proposed to provide a telephone jack and mating telephone plug for each telephone line serviced by the wiring panel. The advantage in implementing such a system is that telephone service can then be established or disconnected simply by inserting or removing the telephone plug from the related telephone jack. Similarly, service for a particular telephone line can be shifted to a different office or apartment simply by shifting a plug on the wiring panel from one telephone jack to another.
However, prior to the development of the present invention, there has been no convenient apparatus for supporting a large number of telephone jacks upon a telephone interchange wiring panel or other wire connecting system in a compact and inexpensive manner. Many thousands of such telephone interchange wiring panels already exist in the field, and any such apparatus for supporting a multitude of telephone jacks must necessarily be compatible and retrofit to existing wiring panels. Because such wiring panels are employed in great numbers, any such apparatus for supporting a multitude of telephone jacks should be inexpensive to manufacture and assemble in order to be practical from a commercial standpoint. In addition, because terminal boards vary in the number of telephone lines which can be handled by each such board, and because the number of telephone lines to be served varies from site to site, any such apparatus for supporting a multitude of telephone jacks upon a wiring panel should ideally be readily reconfigurable to provide a variety of differently numbered and variously spaced telephone jacks.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for supporting a multitude of telephone jacks to be electrically interconnected with a wiring system which apparatus is compact and adapted to be mounted to and used in conjunction with a variety of wiring systems.
It is another object of the present invention to provide such an apparatus which is relatively inexpensive to manufacture and assemble.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide such an apparatus which does not require any modification of conventional telephone jacks already commercially available.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide such an apparatus in which it is a simple matter to vary the number of telephone jacks supported by such an apparatus.
It is another object of the present invention to provide such an apparatus which is easily modified to accommodate various different styles of telephone jacks.
These and other objects of the present invention will become more apparent to those skilled in the art as the description thereof proceeds.