Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id BAA23564; Sun, 23 Feb 1997 01:27:11 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 01:27:11 -0500 (EST) From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Message-Id: <199702230627.BAA23564@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V17 #50 TELECOM Digest Sun, 23 Feb 97 01:27:00 EST Volume 17 : Issue 50 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Utah Selects 435 (John Cropper) Re: Say the Words "Area Code" Before a Phone Number (Chris Farrar) Re: Say the Words "Area Code" Before a Phone Number (Craig Milo Rogers) Re: Idaho Phone Competition (Lee Winson) Re: Cyber Promotions, Evil, Evil, EVIL (Lawrence V. Cipriani) Re: Cyber Promotions, Evil, Evil, EVIL (Travis Dixon) Re: 800/888 Confusion Messes up Advertising (John R. Levine) Re: 800/888 Confusion Messes up Advertising (Judith Oppenheimer) SMS Database Searchable? (Judith Oppenheimer) Re: Satellite Cellular? (Van Hefner) 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: 847-329-0571 Fax: 847-329-0572 ** Article submission address: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Our archives are located at hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Cropper Subject: Utah Selects 435 Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 21:26:39 -0500 Organization: lincs.net Reply-To: jcropper@NOSPAM.lincs.net ...from the Salt Lake Tribune AREA CODE 435: Rural Utah Callers To Ring In Summer With a New Number Thursday, February 20, 1997 BY TOM ZOELLNER THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE Come June, the sovereign state of Utah will be partitioned into two telephonic kingdoms: the 801 and the 435, the Wasatch Front and all the rest. Utah no longer will be unified by the three-digit calling card of its statewide area code. All residents in Salt Lake, Davis, Weber, Morgan and Utah counties will keep the familiar 801 code. But every other county surrounding the urban island has to assume a new digital identity, this newfangled 435. A small piece of rural residents' vital personal data will change forever. When they call home from out of state, they no longer will hear that touch-tone melody -- the A-flat, B-flat and D of 801 -- that can ring out a picture of home from even the coldest phone booth in the loneliest town. ''There's an emotional attachment to an area code,'' acknowledges Jack Ott, the numbering-plan administrator for US WEST in Denver. Telephone companies generally do not have warm or sentimental feelings about numbers, though. Push-Button Pioneers? There was some preliminary talk of making Utah's new code 724, to commemorate July 24, the date that the first Mormon pioneers entered the Great Salt Lake Valley. But 724 already is a working exchange in Orem. So, by a mathematical process of elimination, planners settled on 435. ''For us, area codes are buckets with numbers in them,'' said Ken Branson, a spokesman for Bellcore in Piscataway, N.J., the company that administers area-code assignments. ''It really is a boring, unromantic, practical piece of work that needs to be done.'' Utah has no alternative to creating the new code, said Stephen Mecham, head of the state Public Utilities Commission, which ordered the change. The proliferation of modems, cellular phones and fax machines quickly is exhausting the supply of three-number exchanges. Barflies at the Arrow Club in Price have been grumbling about it, said bartender Diana Jersey. Why, they wonder, should rural people have to change their numbers? ''Nobody's happy about it,'' Jersey said. ''But we don't have much choice. We're out here in the sticks and we don't really belong to the state, do we?'' Whenever North American area codes are split, big-city centers always inherit the old number, Ott said. That's to protect the large number of businesses concentrated in urban cores who would have to print up new business cards, change their billboards and recall their catalogs. Wasted Business Cards: Only businesses outside the 801 island have to deal with this particular hassle. Jolayne Okerlund, who runs the Country Keepsakes store in downtown Salina, ordered 10,000 new business cards imprinted with the 801 area code barely days before she learned of the new code. Now, she's wondering what she's going to do with them. More than a number on a business card, though, the new area code is a high-tech signpost of the changing times. The suburbs may continue to grow and attract residents, but city centers still carry the cultural clout. Chicago kept its cherished 312 area code, and the crescent of suburbs got stuck with 708. Boston retained its trademark 617, while the nether regions beyond the outer belt were consigned to the new 508. And downtown San Francisco, home of the legendary 415, will slough off the South Bay to the dreaded stigma of 650 this August. Affections people may feel for their old area code probably will fade as they get used to the new number, Mecham said. And in any case, the emotional attachment to three little numbers is not nearly as great as the love that old-time telephone customers used to feel for their two-letter word exchanges, such as HIghland 5-0642 or PEnnsylvania 6-5000, which were phased out in the late 1940s. John Cropper, Webmaster voice: 888.NPA.NFO2 Legacy IS, Networking & Communication Solutions 609.637.9434 P.O. Box 277 fax: 609.637.9430 Pennington, NJ 08534-0277 mailto:jcropper@lincs.net http://www.lincs.net/ ------------------------------ From: Chris Farrar Subject: Re: Say the Words "Area Code" Before a Phone Number Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 21:59:52 -0500 Organization: Sympatico Reply-To: cfarrar@sympatico.ca Torsten Lif wrote: > If I wanted to hand this out to somebody in another country I would > give the country code to Sweden (46) followed by just the "8" for > Stockholm and the local number, but to identify that 46 has to be > prefixed by that person's international access number, I'd lead it > with a "+". +46 8 719 4881. To dial that from New York you'd go 01146 > 8 719 4881. From some phones in California it would be 0146 8 719 > 4881. Re your 011 vs 01 for international long distance from Country Code 1 (US and Canada). Generally the breakdown (in Bell Canada territory anyway) is that 011-international number is for direct dialed calls (the equivalent of 1-NXX-NXX-XXXX for long distance within the US and Canada) and 01-international number is for operator assisted calls (the equivalent of 0-NXX-NXX-XXXX within country code 1). Chris Farrar | cfarrar@sympatico.ca | Amateur Radio, a VE3CFX | fax +1-905-457-8236 | national resource PGPkey Fingerprint = 3B 64 28 7A 8C F8 4E 71 AE E8 85 31 35 B9 44 B2 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Feb 1997 09:04:47 -0800 From: rogers@ISI.EDU (Craig Milo Rogers) Subject: Re: Say the Words "Area Code" Before a Phone Number Organization: USC Information Sciences Institute In article shadow@krypton.rain.com (Leonard Erickson) writes: > The international format is basically this: > <+> > The local portion may have spaces in it. Use of any seperators other > than spaces isn't allowed. But, it's a foolish standard. Perhaps it was created by people who thought that creating stylish business cards was the most sophisticated use of a phone number that they could imagine? Spaces are sublect to line breaks and other miscellaneous word processing mayhem. If you're writing the phone number in a plain ASCII file you probably don't have access to a non-breaking space character; even if you have access to one, such as " " in HTML, people often don't remember/bother to use it. I often see a dash or period as a separator: +1-310-822-1511 +1.310.822.1511 This conforms more nicely to the realities of current computerized text processing. Craig Milo Rogers ------------------------------ From: lwinson@bbs.cpcn.com (Lee Winson) Subject: Re: Idaho Phone Competition Date: 21 Feb 1997 22:41:32 GMT Organization: The PACSIBM SIG BBS Per Tad's post of the Knight-Ridder article ... IMHO, the issue is very simple. If "they" want competition (whoever "they" is, I don't know myself), then mandate a competitor may not solicit business until EVERYONE in the service area (ie all of Idaho) can get service, all at the same rate. I think it is utterly ridiculous for these so-called "consumer advocates" to cross-subsidization for one carrier, and free-market for another. You can't have it both ways. And don't forget, there will be a lot of start up costs in interconn- ecting the new startup companies to the existing network. A lot of area code splits are the result of competition. Does anyone remember the Penn Central railroad? The once mighty Pennsylvania and New York Central railroad companies, who at one time set the standard of excellent railroad service, ended up at the bottom of service quality, and went bankrupt. While there were a number of factors, hindsight allows us to see unfair government regulation was a big factor. The Penn Central was forced to operate very unprofitable passenger service and light-duty freight service "in the interests of public service". Regulators treated it as if it had a transportation monopoly when in fact highways and aviation were competing with the railroad. The successor company, Conrail, wasn't able to flourish on its own until railroads were deregulated. These consumer advocates somehow think there's a free lunch, that the telephone companies are filthy rich and can afford to subsidize service while competition doesn't have to. It doesn't work that way. Remember the Penn Central. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You mention the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads which were merged into Penn Central and later turned into Conrail. Then of course Amtrack entered the picture and got things even further out of kilter. Now we are told that Amtrack is as good as dead, with massive cuts in service on a regular basis. None of the grand old passenger trains of the past are running on a daily basis. Some are gone completely and others run three or four days per week. Amtrack is *always* looking for a handout from the various states it operates in; it seems they always threaten to cut even more service unless the local or state government gives them more money. Here in the midwest, Amtrack has repeatedly tried to get money from Wisconsin and Illinois for the Chicago <-> Milwaukee trains. Not too long ago they asked for a million dollars to keep the line operating 'another six months ...'. A guy from Greyhound went to the very same state officials who had been approached by Amtrack and told them in essence if they wanted to give Greyhound a million dollars " ... we will haul people between Milwaukee <-> Chicago for free ..." The bus line currently runs sixteen trips daily between the two cities with most of them as express busses making the trip up and down I-94 in 90 minutes officially, although if the traffic and weather are right, they do it in 75 minutes. A half-dozen of the trips are 'locals' and serve the intermediate points of Skokie, Great Lakes Naval Base, Waukegan, Kenosha and Racine and the 'locals' make it in a little over two hours. All for the fare of eleven dollars from one end to the other and six/seven dollars from either end to intermediate points. But Amtrack can't seem to make do and always needs more money. I think it interesting and relevant that Amtrack is a government agency while the two dozen or so interstate bus lines operating in the USA (being Greyhound with about fifty percent of the traffic; Jefferson Lines with about ten percent of the traffic and the several companies which do business under the 'Trailways' trademark getting the bulk of what is left) are all privately owned and receive no government subsidies at all. They all 'interline' with each other (accept each other's tickets), use each other's bus stations and serve about six thousand communities, many of which are tiny little places. Remember when the railroads *used* to be that way? The railroads were in great shape until the government nationalized them via Amtrack. But then, isn't that always the case when the government decides it can do better than private enterprise? A few years ago in Chicago, the City Council seriously considered 'municipalizing' (that is the polite or politically correct word for stealing something from its owners) Commonwealth Edison under the pretext that would prevent the citizens from getting ripped off on electric bills. A running joke at the time was the bunch of cronies who operate the Chicago Public Schools, the public housing and the public transit would now be operating the nuclear plants as well. That sufficiently scared the beejeezus out of enough corporate executives and civic leaders that the uproar caused the City Council to back down. All the government meddling in the telecom industry has begun to hurt there also. Tell it to the judge I guess. PAT] ------------------------------ From: lvc@lucent.com (Lawrence V. Cipriani) Subject: Re: Cyber Promotions, Evil, Evil, EVIL Date: 22 Feb 1997 13:49:15 GMT Organization: Lucent Technologies, Columbus, Ohio Reply-To: lvc@lucent.com In article , Danny Burstein wrote: > Per an Associated Press story 20-Feb-1997: > New Network Makes Bulk E-Mail Easy > By JENNIFER BROWN Associated Press Writer > PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- It's about to get much easier for advertisers > to send junk e-mail on the Internet. What's to stop an ISP from charging Cyber Promotions for the privilege of sending commercial ads to their subscribers? An ISP could tell their subscribers "In order for you to receive email from a commercial advertiser we require a contractual agreement with the commercial advertiser. We block all incoming email messages from advertisers that we do not have a contractual agreement with." The terms of the contract would then be structured so that the "free rider" aspect of the Internet advertising would be eliminated. That is the ISP would charge a processing fee of, say $1.00, per email message. Then the millions of "free" email messages sent out by Cyber Promotions would then start costing them some serious money. They would be out of business in short order. Is this workable legally, and is it a practical solution to junk email? ------------------------------ From: travisd@saltmine.radix.net (Travis Dixon) Subject: Re: Cyber Promotions, Evil, Evil, EVIL Date: 22 Feb 1997 15:02:56 GMT Organization: RadixNet Internet Services Well, at least it'll be easier to set up the router to block -- they should be limited to a fairly limited block of IP's. Wonder if there's any way of blocking them from access to the NAPs and MAE's?? travis ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Feb 97 10:27:00 EST From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: 800/888 Confusion Messes up Advertising Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg, N.Y. > 888 was, and is, a big mistake. Well, perhaps. There's 8 million 800 numbers possible, and they've all been assigned. How else could the telcos have continued to provide toll-free service to new customers? Adding extra digits won't be feasible for another 25 years, so it's either add more toll-free area codes or else treat 800 as a fixed resource and auction the numbers off every year or something like that. I'm asking this seriously, since maybe there's a better solution nobody's explored. The auction isn't a totally stupid idea -- I have three 800 numbers, none of which get much traffic. If I had to pay a market rate for my 800 numbers, I'd only have one rather than three. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 640 Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, http://iecc.com/johnl, "New witty saying coming soon." ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 22:23:55 -0500 From: Judith Oppenheimer Reply-To: j.oppenheimer@worldnet.att.net Organization: ICB Toll Free News Subject: Re: 800/888 Confusion Messes up Advertising John, at the time that 800 conservation measures were imposed by the FCC, carriers were asked to reply to a survey to ascertain what the replication participation might be. The first question on the survey: "How many 800 numbers are you the Resp Org for?" This was asked of all the Resp Orgs. The answer, total? 4 million+ 800 numbers in use by subscribers - 4 million+ 800 numbers for which Resp Orgs had 'agency' responsibility. Out of 7.8 million 800 numbers. (Remember, with toll-free, these Resp Orgs are supposed to act as *agent* for subscribers, not competitors with them. And Rules for 800 are that a carrier is supposed to have a subscriber order to remove a number from the SMS Database.) So my question to you: what shortage? If carriers, with favored Resp Org access to the SMS, treat 800 numbers as product and line extensions - misappropriating numbers with no subscriber orders attached because they need warehouses of numbers to use as incentives when signing on residential long distance customers (as MCI did), or because they have other "follow-you-around" products that require a portable architecture to ride on - is that a shortage? What it is, is an abrogation of their contractual agency responsibility, and regulatory obligations, as Resp Orgs. That said, with the damage done, the answer is separate domains. There are applications for which the utility of toll free is appropriate - pagers, for instance, and residential toll-free numbers "so Johnny can call home from college." But the BRAND of toll-free - 800 - is heavily relied upon by both consumers and marketers, and not at all necessary for pager and residential use.* These are the applications for which a separate domain - 888 - should have been assigned. However, AT&T & friends said pager companies didn't want 888's. Yet at one of the first FCC meetings on the issue, pager companies said they'd be glad to use 888's - they just needed toll-frees to assign.* Carriers also said consumers wouldn't want to give up residential 800's for 888's*. Why not? It's no different than changing their local area codes, or pager area codes (I'm in New York, where we have 212 for local, and 917 for pager. When the numbers changed, given the one-to-one versus many-to-one logistics of usage for pagers, it just wasn't a big deal.) Who else has recommended this? The Direct Marketing Association. The Communications Managers Association. A number of other comments and responses to the FCC's Toll Free NPRM. So why would the carriers screw this up? Monopoly mentality. Anti-competitiveness. Short-sightedness. Stupidity. Indifference. Outright negligence. Misguided pursuit of corporate agenda above all else. I have stacks of meeting notes from INC, SNAC, and even ITU meetings, which demonstrate this over and over again. So, by no means were all 800's, or even most, assigned. And the separate domain suggestion was raised over two years prior to the release of 888, at an early INC meeting on the issue. Just as the big carriers told the State Dept and ITU that U.S. users had no interest in protecting their domestic 800's in the global marketplace (this *before* 888 became an issue, at the beginning of the formulation of freephone), they pushed the same lies at INC, and to the FCC, until their customers made so much noise (finally) that replication was put on the table. Too bad it was too late for freephone. The better longer-term solution to separate domains? Not auction. Free market. Real estate is a finite resource, yet it doesn't run out. Why? Buying. Selling. Leasing. Renting. An open market of supply and demand. People pay taxes on transactions, the govt gets its take, etc. That is the best solution. We already know it works, because its a very common and routine, if quiet, practice. Second best - separate domains. The only option left - replication (right of first refusal.) Judith *Of the 4 mil + 800 subscribers in the survey, approximately 25% said they'd want to replicate their marketing 800's in 888 - and 877, 866, etc. Only 1% of pager users, and 1% of residential users, said the same thing. ------------------------------ From: Judith Oppenheimer Subject: SMS Database Searchable? Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 09:33:35 -0500 Organization: ICB Toll Free News Reply-To: j.oppenheimer@worldnet.att.net Unless you're a Resp Org - no way! But surprise, surprise, the ITU's global 800 database is now searchable by the public. You can find the search engine on the UIFN site - http://gold.itu.int/cgi-bin/htsh/uifn/uifn.form - but I prefer the one USA Global Link as put up - provides clarifying information, what it does and doesn't do, etc. You can register there as well. You can find that one at hppt://www.thedigest.com/icb/, scroll down to "SEARCH FOR YOUR GLOBAL 800 NUMBER." (Both the ITU's and USA Global Link's searches are free.) BTW, the ITU UIFN sight now lists all the ROA's worldwide - there are five U.S. companies listed in addition to the one's already publicized (ATT, MCI, Sprint, LDDS Worldcom & USA Global Link.) I've noted my comments here previously about ATT, MCI, & Sprint - not recommended - , and USA Global Link - recommended. LDDS Worldcom held up one of our associates for weeks saying they'd get the registration paperwork to them - and then bailed out at the last minute (of the embedding period, claiming they'd decided not to participate?!) So, pending further input, I add them to my "not recommended" list. The new ones listed by the ITU I'll be checking out, and will keep you posted. Judith Oppenheimer ICB Toll Free News http://www.thedigest.com/icb/ ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 19:11:03 -0800 From: Van Hefner Subject: Re: Satellite Cellular? MSgt Paul Berens wrote: > Coincidence? Teledesic is projecting four cents a minute as their > cost. They don't seem to be the company involved in this MLM froth, > but their cost is the same ... See www.teledesic.com > BTW, there's a slight bias in the below. He refers several times to > deployments "this decade". If he's referring to the decade from 1997 > to 2007, there are more than just Iridium. If he's referring to the > decade from 1990 to 2000, it's hardly a big statement since we're 60% > through ... Wonder if he owns Motorola stock??? > I OTOH have no vested interest. I'm active duty military so I've got > no business connection to the issue, and the only stock I own is > Sunshine Mining. (And that just about says it all regarding my > investment acumen!) I wish to reply to the accusations made by Mr. Berens as stated above. To suggest that I am a Motorola stockholder, or that I have anything whatsoever to gain financially by alerting people to such an obvious scam is ludicrous. My only "bias" is that I hate to see people shell out money to become involved in an obviously fraudelent mlm scheme. For the record, I own NO shares of Motorola stock, or any other stock, for that matter. I simply mentioned Motorola's program because it is the satellite-phone system which happens to be nearest actual deployment. I was indeed referring to THIS decade, which I believe technically ends on Dec. 31, 2000. The fact that I was "only" looking ahead a few years, rather than another 10 years, was absolutely intentional. The scheme that I was discussing suggested that this system would be ready for deployment within the next 2-3 months. Obviously, there is no such system in place. I have no doubt that such systems may be deployed after the year 2001, but such systems obviously have no connection with the one I was writing about. FYI, the scamsters I was speaking of have now backed off from their "satellite phone" claims, and now say that satellites will NOT be used. Rather, they are now claiming that these amazingly low rates will be made possible by using what they refer to as a "magic box", which attaches to your phone. This scenario is also obviously fraudelent, and I will be writing another article concering the exact details of the scheme and debunking their technical claims on Monday. William Van Hefner - Editor Discount Long Distance Digest The Internet Journal of the Long Distance Industry http://www.thedigest.com ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V17 #50 *****************************