Play and Learn 2/19941.ZIP/19941/PUBE/TD10470.TXT

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TELECOM Digest     Mon, 9 Jul 90 23:33:39 CDT    Volume 10 : Issue 470

Inside This Issue:                         Moderator: Patrick A. Townson

    Re: Using the "O" Operator to Defeat 800 ANI and Caller*ID [Dave Levenson]
    Re: Public*Phone [David Tamkin]
    Re: Touchtone Fee Abolished in CA [John Higdon]
    Re: Touchtone Fee Abolished in CA [Heath Roberts]
    Re: Touchtone History [John Slater]
    Re: PacBell to Eliminate Touch-Tone Charges [[e-mail]]
    Re: Pentagon Moved to Area Code 703 [Carl Moore]
    Re: Finland Direct (Some Problems) [John R. Covert]
    Re: My Trip to Kansas [Doug Davis]
    Re: Good For a Laugh: Polish Payphones [John Higdon]
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From: Dave Levenson <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Using the "O" Operator to Defeat 800 ANI and Caller*ID
Date: 9 Jul 90 01:13:09 GMT
Organization: Westmark, Inc., Warren, NJ, USA


In article <[e-mail]>, riot![e-mail] writes:

> On a related question: For those of you with Caller*ID, what happens
> when you get a call routed through the "O" operator ?  (the called
> party being someone that you would normally get a calling number from
> on your Caller*ID display).

Here in New Jersey, local calls placed through the operator are
displayed as "OUT OF AREA" on the Caller*ID display.  This makes them
indistinguishable from calls which originate out of the LATA or from
CO's which are not equipped with SS7.  This is also true of calls
dialed as 0+ and charged to a calling card, without any communication
with a human operator.


Dave Levenson            Voice: 201 647 0900  Fax: [phone]
Westmark, Inc.            UUCP: {uunet | rutgers | att}!westmark!dave
Warren, NJ, USA            AT&T Mail: !westmark!dave
[The Man in the Mooney]

------------------------------

From: David Tamkin <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Public*Phone
Date: Sun, 8 Jul 90 21:04:33 CDT


In TELECOM Digest, Volume 10, Issue 468, John Higdon wrote:

| An amusing COCOT incident:

| Needing to reach Pac*Bell over some matters with my residence phone, I
| spotted what looked like a standard Pac*Bell pay phone. It turned out
| to be a [Public*Phone] (tm) with colors and logos that are borderline
| actionable in their resemblance to Pac*Bell. They have blue rectangles
| in the upper left corner and an embossed logo on the coinbox cover
| that from more than ten feet away looks exactly like the puckered
| asshole logo of Pac*Bell.

Around metropolitan Chicago, COCOTs originally looked like something
untoward, but after a while all new ones installed were made to appear
deceptively similar to Illinois Bell coin phones.  One frequently has
to get close enough to see that the logo in the white space in the
upper left of the card is not IBT's before recognizing one of the
buggers for sure.

The guise backfires in Centel's satrapy, where telco pay stations have
a distinctive boxy solid brown or gray housing and a prominent
instruction card in a different position from the IBT payphones and
the COCOTs.  Since there don't seem to be any COCOTs manufactured to
look like the pay phones of independent telqi, the COCOTs in Centel
territory (usually outside gasoline stations or inside restaurants,
but far sparser than in IBT country) stick out like sore thumbs.


David Tamkin  Box 7002  Des Plaines IL  60018-7002  708 518 6769  312 693 0591
MCI Mail: 426-1818  GEnie: D.W.TAMKIN  CIS: 73720,1570   [e-mail]

------------------------------

Organization: Green Hills and Cows
Reply-To: John Higdon <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Touchtone Fee Abolished in CA
Date: 8 Jul 90 21:27:33 PDT (Sun)
From: John Higdon <[e-mail]>


[e-mail] writes:

> This is a relevant question for those of us who live with backwater
> telephone service from NYNEX, as well as arteriosclerotic regulation
> by the Mass. PUC.

Moo, moo, moo! Come to California some time if you want backwater.
Come to California if you want arteriosclerotic (or just plain silly)
regulation.

F'rinstance -- I just talked to one of my major upstairs Pac*Bell
contacts. He says that CLASS will hopefully become available second
quarter 1991. He says that hardware is in place, but that there is
still nothing resembling a tariff.

So much for regulation. Now for backwater. Pac*Bell is still saddled
with major amounts of crossbar (mostly in northern CA). In order to
continue to use this junk, they were forced several years ago to
install the NAC CONTAC to the switches which mainly enables FGD.
Wonderful, you say. However, there were side effects. Unadorned
crossbar has no trouble counting pulse dialing at 20 pps. CONTAC must
see 9-12 pps. Outside of this window is not permitted. Also, Pac*Bell
has just decided that post-dial delay resulting from the CONTAC
operation may be too long. What an understatement. For a DDD call to
LA using AT&T it take three seconds to connect on my ESS and ten
seconds on my crossbar line. That's more than 300% longer!

BTW, there are eight prefixes of crossbar left in my CO alone!
(Crossbar for all of you outside of tel-hell [CA] is that
electro-mechanical stuff you read about in books that now have yellow
pages.) Now what was that about backwater?


        John Higdon         |   P. O. Box 7648   |   [phone]
    [e-mail]     | San Jose, CA 95150 |       M o o !

------------------------------

From: Heath Roberts <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Touchtone Fee Abolished in CA
Reply-To: Heath Roberts <[e-mail]>
Organization: NCSU Computing Center
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 90 20:14:42 GMT


In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:

>Historical questions: when was the last date that AT&T sold switching
>equipment _without_ 100 percent tone dialing coverage?  Competitors?
>When was the last date AT&T sold switches without at least some
>"custom calling" features as standard?  Competitors?  References such
>as magazine articles would be most appreciated.

>This is a relevant question for those of us who live with backwater
>telephone service from NYNEX, as well as arteriosclerotic regulation
>by the Mass. PUC.

I can only speak directly of Northern Telecom, but I am assured by
customers who work with AT&T equipment they ATT's systems are similar.

To the first question: all switches come with tone receivers. But you
need more than one tone receiver for a large switch: if you provide
touch-tone service to 10,000 lines, you might need twenty of them. If
your customers use the phone a lot, you might need thirty. The more
lines you want to connect to tone receivers, the more tone receivers
you need. Only one line can send tones to a given receiver at a time.
The hardware to detect current loop (off-hook or pulse dialing, which
is just a bunch of closely-spaced off-hook signals) is present on the
line card itself: there's one per subscriber loop in the switch. So
you can't really just ask about "100% coverage". It doesn't work that
way. Trying to provide more touch-tone service without adding capacity
is like trying to push a thousand cars an hour down a two lane road:
things back up, everybody gets slowed down, etc. You have to add extra
lanes in the long run.

On the issue of software: switches are like cars. There's the basic
model (switch o.s., no call processing) and then there are the
features.  Call processing is a popular one, so everybody orders it. ;-)
In fact, a telephone switch would be useless without it. But
beyond the basic POTS and switch O/S, everything's optional. Just like
cars, there are attractively priced packages of common options, but
they still cost extra.

It always takes more hardware (and software) to provide these features
-- you don't get something for nothing. The price of the hardware is
coming down, but you need more and more of it (you can actually put
four Gigabytes of RAM--memory, not disk space--on your DMS-100 now if
you need it). Software's also getting to be more and more complex, so
telcos are spending proportionally more on software than they used to.
These costs are the reason I think I'm justified in saying that CLASS
features, although not "advanced" in concept, and even though they're
pretty common, cost operating companies more to provide than POTS.


Heath Roberts
NCSU Computer and Technologies Theme Program
[e-mail]

------------------------------

From: John Slater <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Touchtone History
Date: 9 Jul 90 08:44:35 GMT
Reply-To: John Slater <[e-mail]>


In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Roy
Smith) writes:

>Sitting on the table behind his chair were
>about 3 or 4 single line desk sets, one touch-tone, the rest rotary.

Er, shouldn't that be "one push-button, the rest rotary"?  Unless you
heard the tones when JFK made a call, it could just be a
pulse-dialler.  In the UK, push-button pulse-dialling phones have been
around for years, long before touch-tone came along.


John Slater
Sun Microsystems UK, Gatwick Office

------------------------------

From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: PacBell to Eliminate Touch-Tone Charges
Date: Mon, 09 Jul 90 09:31:05 EDT


John Hammond writes of Touch-Tone service suddenly working on his
line, and speculates about a switch upgrade.  More likely, the switch
hasn't been upgraded.

My understanding is that with crossbar switches, Touch-Tone has to be
enabled for groups of 100 lines at a time.  Thus, if a ``neighbor''
has the service, you can have it, too.  This is in contrast to modern
digital exchanges, where all lines physically can have it, but a
configuration bit tells the switch whether or not to honor the tones.
A year or two ago, NY Telephone announced that they were going to
start looking for people who used Touch-Tone without paying for it,
and send them a bill.  I haven't heard of this actually happening yet.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 9 Jul 90 16:31:08 EDT
From: Carl Moore (VLD/VMB) <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Pentagon Moved to Area Code 703


A recent message in telecom from Greg Monti said that the Pentagon
picked up offices which used to be in Washington, thus (sometime way
back) it was given DC instead of Virginia prefixes.  What place name
will be used for the Pentagon prefixes which have now been put in area
703?

Switching from Washington to Arlington/Alexandria would cause some
changes in the fringes of the calling area.  From the prefixes (other
than DC & Baltimore metro) in the Maryland fringes such as
Gaithersburg and Laurel, DC is local but Virginia is long distance.

And a previous message from me in telecom notes that, despite the
(soon to go away?) ability to make long distance calls to all-but-
outermost Va. & Md. suburbs using area code 202, the already-working
NPA+7D scheme for local DC-area calls will permit area 202 to be used
only for DC prefixes.  I noticed that this NPA+7D can be used even in
one's own NPA in DC-area local calls.

Please correct me if any of this is wrong:

The Pentagon was already reachable as 7D in those extended-area calls
from "Prince William" area.  (Stuart is way down near the North
Carolina border, so there is no danger of prefix duplication involving
694.)  The extended-area calls the other way around now are dialed as
1+703+7D from the Pentagon (they are long distance from DC proper),
and could LATER be reduced to 7, not 10, digits, given that the
Pentagon prefixes are now in 703 area.

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 9 Jul 90 14:22:57 PDT
From: "John R. Covert  09-Jul-1990 1658" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Finland Direct (Some Problems)


>My brother is as an exchange student in Lawton, Michigan. He has tried
>to call our family here at Finland via the Finland Direct service.
>Our PTT has advertised these two numbers:

>1-800-232-0358 via ATT
>1-800-283-4652 via MCI

When I call either of these numbers, I reach a tone _in_Finland_ that
I am not familiar with, but it may simply be a "please wait" tone.  I
suspect the problem is with the grade of service provided by the
operators in Finland.  The tone is roughly 500ms of 950 Hz, 250ms of
950 Hz, 1.5 sec of 1400 Hz.  After a long time of no revenue due to no
answer, AT&T gives up and says "Your call cannot be completed at this
time in the country you are calling."  On MCI it eventually times out
to a reorder (120 interruptions per minute).

>1) Is it true that there can bee 1-800 numbers NOT ACCESSIBLE via
>either ATT/MCI

Any carrier can provide 800 service, but I can verify that 232 is the
AT&T prefix and 283 is the MCI prefix.

>2) If 1) is true, can my brother access another carrier to make the
>1-800 call and does he get any additional charges on that?

No.  But that wouldn't help, since the problem is obviously in
Finland, and not here.

>3) Do these numbers work at all? (PLEASE, I don't want to get such
>news that 4000 telecom readers blocked the Finland Direct service just
>to test if it works..)

It may just be a matter of being patient enough to wait for the
Finland Direct number to answer, though if you're put at the end of
the queue of all the people in Finland calling the international
operator each time you call, you may never get through.

One of the main reasons for USA Direct (the first Home Country Direct
service ever implemented) being established was that it often took a
very long time for operators in many European countries to answer;
Americans are used to operators answering in something between two and
ten seconds.

Your brother should probably simply call the AT&T operator and place
a collect call.


/john

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 9 Jul 90 13:37 CDT
From: Doug Davis <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: My Trip to Kansas
Organization: Logic Process, Dallas Tx


In article <[e-mail]> TELECOM Moderator writes:

>On the way back everything worked fine, except
>that on a few occasions when between carrier areas, the roaming light
>(as opposed to 'no service' light) would come on, leading me to
>believe there was service at that point when there was not.

This is usually due to a phone being programmed to scan the b and a
carriers, sometimes they mistakenly lock on a (insert opposing
carrier)'s signal and roam to it.  The solution is to program your
phone to only scan the correct ( b [wireline] or a [non-wireline] )
carrier for whomever you have a roaming agreement with.

Also sometimes on the CT-301 (and all the other phones made by Mobira)
a close proximity tower of the other carrier will cause your phone to
roam on it, if that tower overpowers the correct carrier for your
phone.

On most phones this is a user option and can be changed "on the fly"
without going into program mode.


Doug Davis/4409 Sarazen/Mesquite Texas, 75150/214-270-9226
{texsun|lawnet|texbell}!letni!doug or [e-mail]

------------------------------

Organization: Green Hills and Cows
Reply-To: John Higdon <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Good For a Laugh: Polish Payphones
Date: 8 Jul 90 21:35:53 PDT (Sun)
From: John Higdon <[e-mail]>


"Donald E. Kimberlin" <[e-mail]> writes:

>         "`Don't have a 20-zloty coin?  Not to worry.  With some
> shrewd dealing you can buy one for as low as 200 zlotys.'"
> (I make that out to be about 2 cents U.S. !)

On a trip to La Paz (Mexico) last year, a local teenager demonstrated
how to make a call if one didn't have the correct change (or didn't
want to actually expend the funds). One takes the coin, (US coins seem
to work for this purpose as well) and insert it partially. When the
telephone appears to have recognized the coin, simply remove it. Many
of the payphones there didn't even require that much effort--they just
provided free calls. Obviously, the Mexican telephone company doesn't
consider public phones to be the gold mine that they are in the US!


        John Higdon         |   P. O. Box 7648   |   [phone]
    [e-mail]     | San Jose, CA 95150 |       M o o !

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End of TELECOM Digest V10 #470
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