Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id WAA16914; Wed, 12 Nov 1997 22:52:21 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 22:52:21 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199711130352.WAA16914@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V17 #312 TELECOM Digest Wed, 12 Nov 97 22:52:00 EST Volume 17 : Issue 312 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson The Internet Will Swallow the Phone System (Monty Solomon) No-PC Internet Phone in Japan (Collin Park) More on Massachusetts Fiber Sabotage (oldbear@arctos.com) Bell Atlantic Boosts Pay Phone Rates (Monty Solomon) Mobile Phone Penetration Rate 39% In Finland (Kimmo Ketolainen) Re: New York Times on Net Day (Derek Uttley) Re: Telco Racks (Don Ritchie) 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: * telecom-request@telecom-digest.org * 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: 847-727-5427 Fax: 773-539-4630 ** Article submission address: editor@telecom-digest.org ** Our archives are available for your review/research. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 23:24:42 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: The Internet Will Swallow the Phone System Reply-To: monty@roscom.COM Begin forwarded message: Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 10:38:25 -0800 (PST) From: Phil Agre Subject: the Internet will swallow the phone system [Forwarded by permission. Gary's right: the Internet's going to swallow the phone system. Informed people disagree mightily about whether the Internet can provide the same functionality as the phone system for much cheaper, but that's not really the point. The point is that connection- oriented voice is just one tiny specialized case of the vast range of possible functionalities that the Internet can provide. It won't be easy, since the Internet architects will have to get quality-of-service differentiation, a reservation protocol, and a decentralized bandwidth market all going at the same time. The people who think they can make this work, like David Clark at MIT (architect) and Jeff McKie-Mason at Michigan (economist) etc etc, are very smart, however, so just give them a few years. In the meantime, please have a talk with your phone company. Explain the Internet Way to them. If you explain it very slowly then they might get it just before they go out of business.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). Send any replies to the original author, listed in the From: field below. You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" command. For information on RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, send an empty message to rre-help@weber.ucsd.edu =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 08:26:54 -0600 From: Gary Chapman To: chapman@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu Subject: L.A. Times column, 11/10/97 Appearing below is my Los Angeles Times column for today, November 10, 1997. Please feel free to pass this on, but please retain the copyright notice. If you have received this message from anyone other than me, Gary Chapman, you might be interested in the Internet listserv that sends my columns and articles out to subscribers. Information about how to subscribe to the listserv is at the end of this message. On the other hand, if you did receive this message from me, you are subscribed to the listserv and need not pay attention to the subscription information. Thanks for signing up. -- Gary Gary Chapman Director The 21st Century Project LBJ School of Public Affairs Drawer Y University Station University of Texas Austin, TX 78713 (512) 471-8326 (512) 471-1835 (fax) gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/21cp Monday, November 10, 1997 DIGITAL NATION You Thought Ma Bell's Demise Was Big? By Gary Chapman Copyright 1997, The Los Angeles Times The telecommunications business, MCI founder Bill McGowan used to say, is "just like any other business, only with a lot more zeros." That's still true, and there are even more zeros now. But these days people in the telecommunications field seem to wake up every day to face a new world. There are new regulations and legislation, court decisions that overturn legislation, big and small mergers and acquisitions, and, of course, new technologies that threaten to turn everything upside-down. Even people in the industry, which is notorious for its jargon and acronym-packed vernacular, have a hard time following what's happening from day to day. So it's nearly impossible for the public to grasp what's going on. But there are some big trends emerging that point to a profound shift in telecommunications in the United States and elsewhere -- and for reasons not yet widely covered in the media. We may be on the leading edge of a paradigm change as significant as the breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s. So far, public attention to this industry has tended to focus on the new environment of deregulation introduced by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and on the subsequent wave of mergers, such as the marriage of Pacific Telesis and SBC Communications, or that of Bell Atlantic and Nynex, all formerly regional Bell corporations. The Telecom Act was supposed to foster competition in services, but the mergers and the legalistic stonewalling of the Bell companies have alarmed critics who think that competition in local markets is being forestalled. This has produced countless droning editorials about the need to speed up the process of competition in telephone service. But meanwhile, in the background and beneath the radar of most editorial writers, new companies and new technologies are emerging that are likely to be the most important players in any future arrangement of telecommunications. In fact, the larger and more well-known companies, particularly AT&T, are beginning to look somewhat desperate in the face of competition from new names that most of the general public has never heard of. The paradigmatic example is WorldCom, a company based in an unlikely location for the headquarters of a telecom empire: Jackson, Miss. WorldCom was pretty much unknown to most people outside the industry until it stunned everyone by offering $29.4 billion in stock to buy MCI, which everyone has heard of. (GTE promptly matched that offer, but with cash.) WorldCom was in the news briefly before the MCI bid when it bought out CompuServe, handed that service's customers to America Online and then kept CompuServe's networking facilities. WorldCom is now the largest Internet service provider in the world. WorldCom President John Sidgmore was a featured speaker at the Technology Summit, a Wall Street Journal-sponsored conference I attended recently in New York. "Where is telecom headed?" Sidgmore was asked. His reply: "Internet, Internet, Internet." Sidgmore pointed out that Internet traffic is growing at about 1,000% a year, while voice traffic is growing at only 10% a year, a figure that hasn't changed in decades. Sidgmore then surprised the audience with this prediction: "In 10 years," he said, "when you look at what's being carried by telecom lines, you won't even know voice is in there." Consider the fact that the U.S. market for voice-based services is $125 billion a year now, and his prediction takes your breath away. Sidgmore believes that the telecom industry will be a trillion-dollar industry early in the next century worldwide and that all the signs point to the Internet as the key to its expansion. Sidgmore noted, for example, that more than half of all international calls are faxes, and once Internet-based faxing becomes widespread, which should happen soon, that will punch a huge hole in the market of conventional telecom carriers. So will Internet telephony. The capability of the Internet to carry voice phone calls is limited now but likely to improve dramatically in the near term. New Internet telephony companies are springing up all over, mostly to capture the new business model of using corporate intranets to replace voicemail systems and PBX switchboards. Reed Hundt, who recently stepped down as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, believes that "there will be a war between the circuit-switch business and the packet-switch businesses," as he told Red Herring magazine recently. Circuit switches are what telephone companies use; packet switching, a different technology, is what Internet companies use. The outcome of this war "will make or break numerous fortune seekers," Hundt said. The older telecom companies are saddled with a large number of liabilities: dated technology; corporate cultures far slower than the entrepreneurial cultures of the upstarts; and an investor base that depends on safe, reliable growth instead of the hell-bent riskiness of the newer ventures. The older giants have tended to focus their strategies for protecting market share on the techniques they know best, such as fighting in the courts and lobbying legislators. But the new companies, such as WorldCom, Qwest, Frontier, Brooks Fiber (recently purchased by WorldCom) and perhaps a reoriented MCI, will be big challengers -- and not chiefly because of changes in regulation but because of immense changes in technology. If the Internet paradigm wins out, if packet-switched networks begin to succeed the circuit- switched infrastructure of the telephone network, then we may see several very familiar names become extinct. And several new names will be part of our household conversations. Gary Chapman is director of The 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu. ----------------------------------------------- Listserv Subscription Information To subscribe to a listserv that forwards the text of and pointers to articles by Gary Chapman, including his column Digital Nation in The Los Angeles Times, follow these instructions: Send mail to listproc@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu Leave the subject line blank. In the first line of the message, put: Subscribe Chapman [First name] [Last name] Leave out the brackets, just put your name after Chapman. Send this message. You'll get a confirmation message back, reporting your subscription, and this message will have some boilerplate text in it about passwords, which you should IGNORE. Passwords will not be required for this listserv. To get off the list, send mail to the same address, with the same message except with the word Unsubscribe substituted for Subscribe. You should get something two or three times a month. I'll occasionally mail out either text or pointers to other articles I have written, besides my column, but I have promised list subscribers that I won't use this list for any other purpose, so traffic should be low. Feel free to pass this listserv subscription information on to anyone else you feel might be interested in subscribing. ------------------------------ From: cpark@gol.com (Collin Park) Subject: No-PC Internet Phone in Japan Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 12:45:40 +0900 Recently AT&T JENS have been advertising their "@phone" service here, and I thought I'd tell you about it. You apply by fax, giving a credit card number (!). Billing is in 1-minute increments, but a detailed statement costs 1000 yen (about $8.00 US) per month. (I guess AT&T JENS took a page from NTT's and KDD's playbook.) The rates are attractive: 24 yen per minute (like 19 cents?) to the US, and similar discounts to other countries. They're also apparently cheaper *within* Japan (like Tokyo-Osaka, maybe 30% cheaper than local carriers, I don't remember rates). My only gripe is with the 4-digit password. The pre-assigned one is "one of the first passwords that any self-respecting hacker would try" and it cannot be changed! The nice lady on the phone guaranteed me that nobody else had the same password, but if anybody gets hold of my access code, then guessing the password would mean free calls (untraceable since I'm so far unwilling to spring for the monthly detailed statement). Anybody else signed up with these guys? Do you have a "hacker's dream" password as well? collin ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 20:46:11 -0500 From: The Old Bear Subject: More on Massachusetts Fiber Sabotage This from Marty Hannigan at XCOM: From: hannigan@xcom.net (Martin Hannigan) Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 19:37:57 GMT Organization: XCOM Technologies - Data Engineering Reply-To: hannigan@xcom.net Considering I've gotten about 2 hours of sleep in the past 24 hours, plus the flu, I can attest to the massive outage caused by an apparent disgruntled employee. 1200 strands, 3 OC48's and multiple OC10s taken out with cutters, deliberately and maliciously. On the OC48 they took out the primary AND the protect ring dissolving their redundancy. And they did cut in multiple locations. Everyone has at least one single point of failure that can cause a massive outage. :) Whether you've identified it or not, it's there. Regards, Martin Hannigan hannigan@xcom.net Director - Data Networks V:617.500.0108 XCOM Technologies, INC. F:617.500.0002 ------------------------ Then, this report from the newspapers Wednesday: Excerpted from {The Boston Globe}, Nov. 12, 1997, page B3... Vandalism disrupts phones, cable TV: Lines are severed in several towns by Joann Muller, Globe Staff About 40,000 Greater Boston homeowners lost their cable TV service and 350 businesses lost telephone service over parts of three days after an apparent rash of vandalism that began Saturday. Media One, the region's largest cable operator, and Teleport Communications Group, a long-distance phone company, said their services were disrupted Saturday night, early Sunday, and Monday evening after vandals apparently climbed at least eight utility poles and cut the companies' one-inch-thick fiber cables. The two companies, whose cables share a fiber optic conduit, offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the vandals. Media One spokesman Rick Jenkinson said he believes his company was the target of the sabotage, because many of the incidents occurred near Media One buildings or facilities. The sabotage began at about 9:30 p.m. Saturday when someone climbed a pole in Woburn and cut a bundle of fiber cables, Jenkinson said. Customers in surrounding communities were affected, he said, but service was restored within an hour and 15 minutes. About six hours later, similar incidents occurred in Needham and Newton, he said. Then, at about 5:30 p.m. Monday, five more cables were cut in Natick, Dedham, and Needham. About 26,000 Media One customers were affected over the weekend, he said, and another 18,000 on Monday evening. All cable customers received a one-day credit for the lost service. Teleport's phone customers weren't affected much, said spokeswoman Donna Suky, because the outages occurred over the weekend or after hours when most of the businesses were closed. The phone lines were back on before most customers even knew there was a problem, she said. Both companies said they have extensive backup systems that enabled them to restore service quickly. The companies have set up a toll-free, confidential hot line (800-298-9790, ext. 8120) for tips about the vandalism. State and local police from several communities are investigating. Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 20:26:51 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Bell Atlantic Boosts Pay Phone Rates MANCHESTER, N.H. (Reuters) - Bell Atlantic Corp. said Wednesday it is raising the price of a local call from its pay phones in eight states and Washington, D.C., to 35 cents from 25 cents, citing pressure from competitors. The Northeastern local telephone provider said rates will go up in New Hampshire, West Virginia, Virginia, Washington, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Vermont. The new rate will begin Nov. 19. It will take about three months to adjust all the pay phones to the new rate, the company said. Bell Atlantic said Congress last year confirmed that the pay telephone business is competitive, ordered it deregulated and required that all direct and indirect subsidies of the service be eliminated. Bell Atlantic said it must pay competitive commissions for property owners to place its pay phones in their businesses and must charge a competitive price to users of those phones. "Like any competitive business, we need to respond to market conditions," said Lorraine Chickering, president of Bell Atlantic Public Communications. ------------------------------ From: kk@sci.fi (Kimmo Ketolainen +358 40 55555 08) Subject: Mobile Phone Penetration Rate 39% In Finland Date: 12 Nov 1997 06:58:27 GMT Organization: Sirius Cybernetics Inc Finland According to the Ministry of Transport and Communications report this week, the number of mobile phones in the country exceeded two million in the beginning of November. This means that 39 Finns out of 100 are now carrying around a mobile phone. 50,000 new subscriptions are signed every month. Very close behind come the other Nordic countries - Sweden, Iceland, Norway and Denmark. The Finnish mobile phone market is heavily dominated by the local producer Nokia. Several local GSM 1800 networks are being launched in major towns to provide competition against the analog NMT 450/900 and the digital GSM 900 networks of Telecom Finland and Radiolinja. At the moment, the most inexpensive subscriptions for a mobile phone cost 50 mk (10 USD) to open and require 20 mk (4 USD) as the monthly fee. MTC: www.vn.fi/lm | Nokia: www.nokia.com | Telecom Finland: www.tele.fi Radiolinja: www.radiolinja.fi Kimmo Ketolainen * kk@sci.fi * http://iki.fi/kk/ * +358 40 55555 08 mail2sms: sms@kk.iki.fi * sms2mail: +358 50 582 7229/"kk message.." ------------------------------ From: Derek Uttley Subject: Re: New York Times on Net Day Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1997 12:43:06 -0500 Organization: Newbridge Networks Corporation Reply-To: duttley@spamnewbridge.com Dave Hughes wrote: > I'll tell you here and now, any English teacher can and could, with a > combination of classroom computers and links to the Internet impart > more ENGLISH language literacy to a group of students, than the same > teacher with pencils, paper, and books over the same period of > time. And, at the same time, develop facility with forms of English > used online (which differs, when done well, as much from paper-written > forms as does the spoken word from the written text) > I proved that 14 years ago with Radio Shack and Osborne computers > accounts on the Source, and modem access to bulletin-boards. And some > college freshman instructors who took my course in 'Electronic > English' (and I don't mean word processing) demonstrated the same > thing. > That does not mean that all, or many, English teachers know how to > teach English using computers and networks. But give me 30 students in > a classroom with 15 networked computers with software of my choice, > you take 30 in a classroom with pencils, paper, and books of your > choice and after a school year, my students will wipe the floor with > your paper crowd, in spelling, grammar, puncutation, composition, > and general English Language literacy. But ... will they be able to write (i.e. use a pen/pencil in a way that can be deciphered by others?), or are you saying that cursive writing will not be required in the future? > They will also be far more prepared to graduate to higher and more > subtle levels of computer and network use for further education or > movement directly into the workforce. > It is beyond me why the myth persists that reading and writing using > computers, and communicating via the Internet in written forms, is not > itself the use of the English language in ways so much more efficient > in the use of time, and the skills (or lack thereof, as in typing > skill) used in writing well, than relying on traditional paper and > pencils. When there is a power failure, or an equipment failure, one may have to rely on traditional methods. ------------------------------ From: Don Ritchie Subject: Re: Telco Racks Date: 12 Nov 1997 06:00:07 GMT Organization: New Age Consulting Service Inc., Cleveland, OH, USA Adept Care <*NOSPAM*adept@aspi.net*NOSPAM*> wrote: > Can anyone point me to a manufacturer of 19" telco racks in the New > England area? GrayBar or Alltel can sell you a Chatworth rack 7' 19" rack should cost around 150 bux Don Ritchie Century Communications Euclid, Ohio dritchie@nacs.net - k8zgw@hac.org - don@hamnet.org ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V17 #312 ******************************