Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id MAA17259; Thu, 9 May 1996 12:01:04 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 9 May 1996 12:01:04 -0400 (EDT) From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick A. Townson) Message-Id: <199605091601.MAA17259@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V16 #226 TELECOM Digest Thu, 9 May 96 12:00:00 EDT Volume 16 : Issue 226 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson ISP Sharing Protocol (to Compete With Big Money ISPs) (Joseph H. Allen) Book Review: "Web Search Strategies" by Pfaffenberger (Rob Slade) NewsFirst Extra - Nortel and Internet Access (Tara D. Mahon) Spurious 911 Calls From a PABX (Atri Indiresan) Cellular User Saves Suicide Jumper (Tad Cook) Registration Information: IVTTA '96 (Murray F. Spiegel) Editorial: Overlaying Area Codes (Tad Cook) Is There an Auto-Gain Control on my Data Line? (Justin Hamilton) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and America On Line. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available to qualified organizations and individual readers. Write and tell us how you qualify: * ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu * The Digest is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson of Skokie, Illinois USA. You can reach us by postal mail, fax or phone at: Post Office Box 4621 Skokie, IL USA 60076 Phone: 500-677-1616 Fax: 847-329-0572 ** Article submission address: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Our archives are located at mirror.lcs.mit.edu and are available by using anonymous ftp. The archives can also be accessed using our email information service. 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A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jhallen@world.std.com (Joseph H Allen) Subject: ISP Sharing Protocol (to Compete With Big Money ISPs) Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Wed, 8 May 1996 17:43:30 GMT AT&T is now in the dialup slip and ppp business -- other long distance companies and other big money companies are soon to follow. Long distance carriers have a distinct advantage over smaller ISPs: they can provide the travelling internet user with nation (and perhaps world) wide access, without the need for making long-distance calls. Smaller ISPs must deal with this issue, or AT&T and friends will quickly put them out of business. I propose that ISPs adopt a sharing protocol. This protocol will allow a travelling internet user to dial any local internet provider without having to go through the process of signing on and without having to worry about paying multiple bills. Suppose my home internet provider is The World in Boston and I'm visiting Long Island. I should be able to call Li.net say, and log on to the net as follows: li.net login: jhallen home isp: world.std.com (hit return for the local one here?) protocol: ppp (could be 'slip' or 'shell' also) password: xxxxx Li.net would then contact The World (over the net, of course) for password verification and a billing agreement. When the session is completed, Li.net sends a bill to The World, who must pay li.net a fee (which will show up on my bill). A protocol for this would be simple. The remote ISP gets a ticket number from the home ISP for the specific account. When the session is complete, the remote ISP gives the bill and the login time along with the ticket number to the home ISP. Each ISP would maintain a list of ISPs from which users would be accepted. The billing agreement should not be too difficult either. In my example above, li.net should charge whatever their hourly rate is. The World should not charge their hourly rate, but can charge a small remote billing fee (The World isn't giving any system resources here; except for the billing). If the ISPs charge a flat monthly fee, the hourly rate used is that divided by 750 (hours in a month). If the home ISP charges a flat fee, it should subtract the value of the number of remote hours as calculated above. The real problem is one of credit. Which ISPs will you trust to actually pay their remote usage fees? There are two ways to solve this problem: start our own credit reporting agency or use an established one (TRW and the like). There are going to be a small enough number of ISPs so that starting our own will would not be difficult. The credit agency would keep a list of ISPs with good credit. If anyone doesn't pay their fees in 60 days, they are removed from the list. To establish credit, you could get a report from TRW or pay a deposit to the credit agency equalling one month's worth of expected remote usage fees (to be based on the number of modems you have perhaps). If you pay your bills for three months, you get this deposit back. Credit reporting is important because it will allow the system to grow much faster than it would if each company had to make agreements with each other company. I could see cases where colleges, non-ISP companies or even individuals with good credit could enter the system so their students or employers could access the net when travelling. There's no reason to let AT&T put anyone out of business, when all that is needed is a software protocol and a credit agency. A secondary benefit is that the login sequence would be standardized, which would vastly simplify the implementation of 'internet in a box' type products. Comments? Suggestions? jhallen@world.std.com (192.74.137.5) * Joseph H. Allen * [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In other words, all ISPs could pool their incoing traffic through modem banks located in various places and transfer the traffic among themselves. This is an idea which might work and be quite beneficial. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 08 May 1996 13:49:30 EST From: Rob Slade Subject: Book Review: "Web Search Strategies" by Pfaffenberger BKW3SRST.RVW 960416 "Web Search Strategies", Bryan Pfaffenberger, 1996, 1-55828-470-2, U$29.95/C$41.95 %A Bryan Pfaffenberger bp@virginia.edu %C 115 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011-4195 %D 1996 %G 1-55828-470-2 %I MIS Press/M&T Books/Henry Holt %O U$29.95/C$41.95 +1-212-886-9378 fax: +1-212-633-0748, +1-212-807-6654 %O 76712.2644@compuserve.com http://www.mispress.com fburke@fsb.superlink.net %P 427 %T "Web Search Strategies" This book does contain a wealth of interesting information, particularly in terms of subject organized Web sites and search engines. The author breaks topical sites down into "Starting Points", "Subject Trees" and "Trailblazer Pages". These divisions appear to be arbitrary, and mean that you have to look in three places to gather the whole set of information, but a good deal of it is there. (New sites, of course, spring up on the net all the time: the publication of the book must have missed AltaVista by a very slim margin.) Strategies, however, are not a major focus. A point always mentioned by experienced searchers is to use a text browser or to turn off images to speed "surfing" time: Pfaffenberger recommends the use of a graphical browser. The actual lists of tactics comprise only two chapters. They are quite helpful for rank newcomers, but don't go into much depth. For example, boolean (logical) operators are covered, but only briefly, and in isolation. There is no coverage of combined boolean algebra (absolutely essential to fine tune your requests on large search engines) and only scant mention of boolean options in the discussions of specific search sites. For newcomers overwhelmed by the size of the Web, this will provide at least a starting point. The sites listed, and procedures suggested, can help you begin to see entry points. Effective use of the Web, however, will require either more information or experience. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1996 BKW3SRST.RVW 960416. Distribution permitted in TELECOM Digest and associated publications. DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters roberts@decus.ca slade@freenet.victoria.bc.ca Rob_Slade@mindlink.bc.ca Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 8 May 96 16:00:08 -0400 From: Tara D. Mahon Subject: NewsFirst Extra - Nortel and Internet Access Part of the NewsFirst Telecom Service < From THE INSIGHT RESEARCH CORPORATION > Telecom Market Research, Analysis, and Consulting Vol. 4 Issue E4 Nortel May 2, 1996 Internet Access: Telco or CATV, Nortel Doesn't Care John Roth, president of Nortel North America and COO of Nortel Ltd., was in an upbeat mood last week when we met him just before a board meeting in Calgary. John had plenty of reasons to be smiling: corporate revenues climbed 16 percent over 1995 Q1 performance, expenses were on the decline, and Roth's North American portfolio was the driving force behind Nortel's corporate comeback. The company was in deep yogurt a little more than three years ago with DMS software glitches dragging down profits from the 11 percent range to the vicinity of three to four percent. Jean Monty, an ex-investment banker with years of Bell Canada background, was brought in by BCE to put the ship back on course. He plucked Roth out of Nortel's wireless group to run the N. American operations and the rest, as they say, is history. Roth began our discussion by pointing out that the current product portfolio positions the company for sustainable growth. "The mix of business is very positive, switching is doing very well, broadband is great, and the data products (which includes the Magellan line of data switches) have doubled their contribution" to revenue. Looking out 24 to 36 months, we believe Nortel is ready to ride the down-market data comm wave as residential and small business users jump onto the Internet. According to Roth, Nortel will be announcing an "ADSL-like" technology for telco Internet access in the next few months. "We couldn't see the business case for broadband TV access for telcos" when TV-enabling high-speed access products were all the rage a few years ago, commented Roth. But things look different when telcos consider the investment needed to upgrade to high-speed access for the more forgiving error-rate requirements of a data application. Roth continued, "We think we can deliver 6 Mbps that is at least as good as what you could do with a cable modem, since the error rate isn't as crucial in the Internet environment as it would be in the broadband TV. " When we asked John to discuss performance and pricing, he declined. Roth also foresees CATV industry Internet access becoming increasingly important, but his starting premise was different. "Internet access will be a great revenue source for the CATV industry," Roth said, "but we want to get them to voice first." Roth maintains that adding voice switching capability to a modern CATV plant is not the big investment; "It's not a big ticket item. The switch serves your entire plant. Where you need cash flow is for the plant upgrades." Nortel views voice switching as its opening gamut; once a DMS is in place it becomes easier to add to the fast-packet ATM switches like Corcorde as the backbone access node. When we asked whether Nortel would consider moving into the set-top box arena, Roth expressed little interest in driving into that muddy water. Reports coming out of the Western Cable show say the big MSOs like Cox and Comcast will be buying 100,000 boxes per year over the next three years from General Instruments. But with end-user pricing at the $400 to $450 range, Insight expects this market to take off slowly. When we asked about Nortel's wireless portfolio, Roth noted that their co-manufacturing arrangement with Qualcomm has given the company a unique advantage in CDMA development. Roth's plant in Calgary is in the midst of a shop floor makeover to accommodate the CDMA ramp up--but the volume shipments are still some months off. The gating factor will be handset. "We're going to go through the same growing pains as TDMA," Roth said. For the market to really take off, "we've got to get the handsets out there ... and we won't be out in volume until Q2 of 1997. We think this is true for all the vendors, including Motorola," Roth concluded. With the DMS problems behind them, wireless growing at nearly 75 percent last year, and excellent prospects in data comm, Nortel is on a roll. John Roth was smiling when we met him in Calgary, and he just may keep right on doing it. < < < N E W S F I R S T <> T E L E C O M > > > Copyright 1996, The Insight Research Corporation 354 Eisenhower Parkway Livingston, New Jersey 07039-1023 USA (201) 605-1400 voice (201) 605-1440 fax reports@insight-corp.com *Electronic Distribution Granted, Provided This Notice Remains Intact* ------------------------------ Subject: Spurious 911 Calls From a PABX Date: Wed, 08 May 1996 22:38:53 -0400 From: Atri Indiresan At the University of Michigan, we need to dial '9' to access external lines. The switch is programmed in such a way that, if while dialing 9-1-(long distance number), the pause is too long after 9-1, it completes the call as 911. The emergency dispatch center gets between 10 and 30 such calls every night, and the caller usually simply hangs up when they realize the error. The dispatch center always calls back to check on the hangup, and since we have a large international population here, many of whom do not speak English well, some are unable to clarify the situation, and the police need to be dispatched to the location. The university police are trying to persuade the phone company to change the external access number to '8', or something else. They have been resisting so far on a plea of cost. We have a Centrex exchange. I suspect that the technical part of reprogramming it would be negligible, but re-education would be the most expensive part of the changeover. Do other PABXs have similar problems? Any insights into the technical and other aspects of this issue? Atri Indiresan ------------------------------ From: Tad Cook Subject: Cellular User Saves Suicide Jumper Date: Wed, 8 May 1996 13:52:12 PDT SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 8, 1996-- Cellular One in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area today announced that Dr. Dennis Tison, a Moraga, Calif., resident, was honored today by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) for using his cellular phone to save the life of a man who jumped off the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Tison, a customer since 1995, received the VITA Award in the `LifeSaver` category at a special ceremony today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The awards and ceremony are part of the activities surrounding National Wireless Safety Week, May 6-10. CTIA has presented VITA Awards every year since 1990. VITA is the Latin word for life, and recipients are honored for using their phones to save lives or promote public safety. On Dec. 26, 1995, Tison, a forensic psychiatrist and full-time law student at Hastings Law School, was rowing his row boat in the Bay and saw the jumper just seconds after he entered the water. Initially, Tison thought it was a sea lion and then quickly realized it was a person. Tison tossed him a life preserver and immediately dialed 911 on the cellular phone that he carries everywhere. After receiving information about the situation, the Coast Guard arrived within minutes and delivered the man to a waiting ambulance on the pier. "I am really just glad that I was in the right place at the right time and was able to help," said Tison. "I have experienced firsthand the need for and the importance of wireless communications. That day it made a difference in two people's lives." Fortunately, because of the quick actions from Tison, the man suffered only minor injuries. Later, from his hospital bed, he expressed his gratitude to Tison for saving his life. "This is an amazing example of the critical role wireless communications plays not only in helping people manage their busy work and personal lives, but enabling them to increase their safety and even save lives," said Sue Swenson, president and chief executive officer of Cellular One. "We are extremely proud that Cellular One was able to play a vital role in this situation." About Cellular One: Cellular One is the leading cellular service provider and the exclusive provider of digital cellular service in the Greater Bay Area. It is a partnership of two communications companies, Air Touch Communications, San Francisco, and AT&T Wireless Services, Kirkland, Wash. http://www.businesswire.com ------------------------------ From: spiegel@bellcore.com (Murray F Spiegel) Subject: Registration Information: IVTTA '96 Date: 8 May 1996 20:39:47 GMT Organization: Speech Technology Research Group (Bellcore) Reply-To: spiegel@bellcore.com REGISTRATION INFORMATION FOR THIRD IEEE WORKSHOP ON INTERACTIVE VOICE TECHNOLOGY FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS APPLICATIONS REGISTRATION INFORMATION = REGISTRATION INFORMATION = REGISTRATION INFORMATION September 30 - October 1, 1996 The AT&T Learning Center 300 N Maple Ave Basking Ridge, NJ 07920 USA Sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society The third of a series of IEEE workshops on Interactive Voice Technology for Telecommunications Applications will be held at the AT&T Learning Center, Basking Ridge, New Jersey, from September 30 - October 1, 1996. The conference venue is on 35 semi-rural acres and is close enough (1 hour) for side trips to New York City. Our workshop will be held immediately before ICSLP '96 in Philadelphia, PA, approximately 80 miles from our location. Due to workshop facility constraints, attendance at the Workshop will be limited to no more than 150 people, with priority given to presenters. In accordance with IEEE regulations, additional registrants will be accepted only on a first-come, first-served basis, space permitting. To register for IVTTA '96, send the following information, along with appropriate funds, to the AT&T address below. We regret that credit cards cannot be accepted. Registrations NOT accompanied by appropriate U.S. funds WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED. Additional information is at http://superbook.bellcore.com/IVTTA.html Your title: Professor __ Dr. __ Mr. __ Ms. __ Mrs. __ Other __ Family name _______________________ Given Name ______________________ Affiliation ______________________________________ Postal Address (Office __ Home __) __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ Country _________ Contact information: Fax __________________________________ E-mail Address _______________________ Telephone (include country code) ___________________________ Indicate the registration categories that apply to you (see explanations below): Full registration ______ Day-only registration _______ IEEE member ______ Non-IEEE member _______ Using fee schedule below, write subtotal $ ________ I want ____ extra copies of the proceedings: $25/copy: Subtotal: $ ________ Total enclosed: $ _________ All registrants must include a draft in US Dollars only. (We are sorry, NO CREDIT CARDS can be accepted.) Mail registration form and funds to the following address: Dick Rosinski IVTTA Workshop AT&T Bell Laboratories, HO 1J-322 101 Crawfords Corner Rd P O Box 3030, Holmdel, NJ 07733-3030 1-908-949-0059 Registration fees Before 6/15/96 Before 8/30/96 Full Registration IEEE member $650 $750 Full Registration Non-IEEE member $700 $800 Day-only Registration IEEE member $400 $500 Day-only Registration Non-IEEE member $450 $550 DAY-ONLY REGISTRATION includes: All technical sessions, welcoming reception, lunches, snacks, banquet, and a copy of the proceedings. FULL REGISTRATION includes all of the above plus: Dinner on evening of arrival, breakfast both days, two nights lodging at the conference center, and use of the center facilities (jogging track, exercise center, pool, etc). Remember: Attendance is limited to no more than 150 people. Non-presenting registrants will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis, space permitting. Registrations not accompanied by appropriate U.S. funds cannot be accepted. IVTTA '96 welcomes your participation and hopes you have a productive and enjoyable workshop. ------------------------------ From: Tad Cook Subject: Editorial: Overlaying Area Codes Date: Wed, 8 May 1996 13:46:14 -0700 (PDT) Editorial May 2 {Merced Sun-Star} (Merced, California) on `overlaying' area codes: The telephone company is proposing the worst idea since somebody came up with playing Muzak for callers on hold. It goes by the innocuous name of "overlaying," and it's a plan where one area code could overlap another. Under the overlaying concept, it would be possible that a Merced household with two phone lines could have two different area codes. It's conceivable that your area code could be different from your next-door neighbor's but could the same as someone in San Diego ... While geographically splitting up an area code is easier on customers, it's harder for the phone company. Pac Bell would prefer the overlaying area code because it is cheaper to implement. If Pac Bell confined the overlaying area code to one kind of service -- ideally cellular phones that are already mobile -- it could work with a minimum of trouble. But if the phone company assigns the new area codes in a helter-skelter way, it will create a customer nightmare ... When it comes time for public comment,s we urge everyone to tell the Public Utilities Commission to say no to Pac Bell's overlaying plan ... ------------------------------ From: Justin.Hamilton1@Bridge.BellSouth.Com (Justin Hamilton) Subject: Is There an Auto-Gain Control on my Data Line? Date: Wed, 08 May 1996 20:00:51 GMT Organization: BellSouth ATG lab Hey there, A quick question, is there anything I can ask my Telco to change on my data line that may make it perform better? Is there some Auto-Gain control they can twiddle? I'm just wondering if I can push my V.34+ to it's absolute limits since I only get 26.4Kbps to my ISP's V.34+ modems. TIA, Justin Hamilton tme@viper.net http://www.mindspring.com/~shawnham ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V16 #226 ******************************