Balanced Line - Telephone Systems

Telephone Systems

The first application for balanced lines was for telephone lines. Interference that was of little consequence on a telegraph system (which is in essence digital) could be very disturbing for a telephone user. The initial format was to take two single-wire unbalanced telegraph lines and use them as a pair. This proved insufficient, however, with the growth of electric power transmission which tended to use the same routes. A telephone line running alongside a power line for many miles will inevitably have more interference induced in one leg than the other since one of them will be nearer to the power line. This issue was addressed by swapping the positions of the two legs every few hundred yards with a cross-over, thus ensuring that both legs had equal interference induced and allowing common-mode rejection to do its work. As the telephone system grew, it became preferable to use cable rather than open wires to save space, and also to avoid poor performance during bad weather. The cable construction used for balanced telephone cables was twisted pair, however, this did not become widespread until repeater amplifiers became available. For an unamplified telephone line, a twisted pair cable could only manage a maximum distance of 30 km. Open wires, on the other hand, with their lower capacitance had been used for enormous distances - the longest was the 1500 km from New York to Chicago built in 1893. Loading coils were used to improve the distance achievable with cable but the problem was not finally overcome until amplifiers started to be installed in 1912. Twisted pair balanced lines are still widely used for the telephone subscribers local end.

Telephone trunk lines, and especially frequency division multiplexing carrier systems, are usually 4-wire circuits rather than 2-wire circuits (or at least they were before fibre-optic became widespread) and require a different kind of cable. This format requires the conductors to be arranged in two pairs, one pair for the sending (go) signal and the other for the return signal. The greatest source of interference on this kind of transmission is usually the crosstalk between the go and return circuits themselves. The most common cable format is star quad, where the diagonally opposite conductors form the pairs. This geometry gives maximum common mode rejection between the two pairs. An alternative format is DM quad which consists of two twisted pairs with the twisting at different pitches.