Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id NAA22667; Sun, 23 Nov 1997 13:32:16 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 13:32:16 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199711231832.NAA22667@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V17 #325 TELECOM Digest Sun, 23 Nov 97 13:32:00 EST Volume 17 : Issue 325 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FITCE Congress London, 24-28 August 1998 (Dominic Pinto) Re: Ericsson TDMA Cellphones: Gimme A Break! (Ted Klugman) Re: OLS (Originating Line Screening) via PRI (Q.931 Message) (F McClintic) Re: TWX/Telex, Realtime vs Store/Forward (oldbear@arctos.com) Re: The Internet Will Swallow the Phone System (John R. Levine) Re: Seven-Digit Cross-NPA Dialing (Linc Madison) Re: Seven-Digit Cross-NPA Dialing (Bill Levant) Re: Cell Phones,'Crime Fighters of the '90s,' Are Striking Out (Mike Fox) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dominic Pinto Subject: FITCE Congress London, 24-28 August 1998 Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 10:56:00 -0000 37th European Telecommunications Congress 'Diverging Roles in a Converging Marketplace' CALL FOR PAPERS Telecommunications is converging with computing and broadcasting, opening new opportunities both for traditional operators and new arrivals. By the time of the Congress, the European telecommuni- cations market will have been open for nine months to new entrants from all industries. Papers are invited exploring the technical and commercial opportun- ities that this situation offers. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to: The impact of new technology; New roles and challenges for telcos; Differentiation in, and the structure of, the telecommunications business; Life with regulations and the regulator; Working with multiple standards and parallel solutions; Increasing user expectations; Price versus service; Access, interconnection, service and network management in a multi-provider environment; Electronic commerce. Guidelines for submission of papers: Authors are requested to submit an abstract of 200-400 words. Abstracts must be submitted in the English language and should be previously unpublished. Abstracts must be sent by 1 March 1998 to: Paul Nichols, FITCE UK, Room G012, 8-10 Gresham Street, London EC2V 7AG, UK. Telephone: +44 171 356 8022; Facsimile: +44 171 356 7942; e-mail: nicholsp@grsec2.agw.bt.co.uk (plain text only)). Please include your name, address, telephone and facsimile numbers as well as e-mail address, and affiliation. The abstracts will be reviewed by the International Paper Selection Committee for relevance, technical content and originality. Authors will be informed by 31 March 1998 whether their proposed paper has been selected for presentation. The full text is required by 1 June 1998. The Congress Website: http://www1b.btwebworld.com/fitce98/enhome.htm Check there to receive information about submitting papers and attending FITCE+98. You will find details about the congress venue and programme, as well as suggestions for planning your visit to London. The contents include details on how to book your accommodation and advice about travel. Included is a list of key contacts for further information. These pages are also available in Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. ------------------------------ From: ted_klugman@usa.net.NOSPAM (Ted Klugman) Subject: Re: Ericsson TDMA Cellphones: Gimme A Break! Date: Sat, 22 Nov 1997 22:21:40 GMT Organization: Zippo News Service [http://www.zippo.com] On Sun, 16 Nov 1997 08:42:05 -0500, aboritz@cybernex.net (Alan Boritz) wrote: > Think you're interested in buying a new Ericsson digital TDMA phone > for your carrier's digital service? Think again. After a month of > poor service and mostly badly distorted connections (at least 2/3 of > all mobile calls) on AT&T's cellular system in New York, FWIW, it's an IS-136 overlay on their existing 800Mhz analog system. I'm also an AT&T customer in the same area. The difference is that I've got a Nokia 2160. Sure, I've had my share of bad connections, dropped calls, etc. But I've been very satisfied with my service. Personally, I've got three good friends who all work at AT&T RF Engineering (two in Paramus and one who just transferred to Seattle). None of 'em use the Ericsson - they all use the 2160. > To add to disappointment, I found that the great digital messaging > built into this phone won't work outside of the NYC metro area The sales rep should have told you this when you subscribed. Think of it this way -- at least the phone works out of the AT&T PCS area. Some other PCS phones can't roam on analog systems. Supposedly, if you go to another AT&T IS-136 area, your PCS features will probably work. And rumor has it that they'll be setting up an agreement with Comcast Cellular, who covers South Jersey. Comcast already has IS-136 deployed "unofficially" > (my voice mail was happily announcing to leave a numeric message > that I wouldn't see for another three days, while out of town on > business). I also found that even while in range of the system, > digital messaging has been extremely slow (last night I got a > voicemail alert two hours after returning to the area, and an hour > after a two-day-old text message finally reached me). This shouldn't be the case -- but maybe it has something to do with the Ericsson phone. When I travel into the AT&T coverage area I usually get my messages within about ten minutes. ------------------------------ From: Fred McClintic Subject: Re: OLS (Originating Line Screening) via PRI (Q.931 Message) Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 09:45:28 -0600 Robert M. Gutierrez wrote: > Has anybody been able to provision a PRI with a LEC, CLEC or IXC that > will or can pass OLS digits from their switch? I just went out for bid for a dedicated PRI from the IXCs. They (and Bellcore) refer to the OLS digits you speak of as "Information Indicator" (II) digits. AT&T offers them for sure, and doesn't charge extra for them as long as you pay the penny per call for ANI. MCI talked as though they either offered them or would in the very near future. Sprint, WorldCom, etc I'm not sure of since their mileage charges were outragous compared to AT&T and MCI. I never went any further with them. Since the II digits are part of ANI, I doubt that you could get them (except possibly for terminating toll-free numbers??) from the LECs or CLECs without getting FGD lines. All the LECs will give you for normal lines is CLID, which isn't ANI ... > There are usually 2 OLS digits that are usually prefixed on the ANI. > So for FGB or FGB inband signalling, you would get 12 digits, the first > 2 being the OLS digits, and the other 10 being the ANI of the call. Granted, for inband, that is the case. For D-channel signalling, according to AT&T's PRI specification document (AT&T - not Bellcore - TR 41459), they are transmitted by an Originating Line Information (OLI) information element which is specified as Codeset 6 (Network-specific). MCI could not give me a similar document though they said they "follow all published standards", so I assume that they will follow AT&T's lead on the delivery method. > OLS digits can define the type of originating service, like public > coin, hotel, hospital, prison (!), and also flag ANI failures > and customer provided ANI digits. Yup. The complete list is in the Bellcore Local Exchange Routing Guide. > Yes, we are set up to use this information. Unfortutantely, our switch doesn't recognize OLI IE ... :( > Unfortunately, I have not looked at the Q.931 document from the ITU > to see if there is a digit length in the called number field. I > would assume not for international and future portability (god forbid > that I think U.S. centric!). So with that in mind, is there any > options in the DMS-100 or 5ESS generic that provide passing of the > OLS digits in the Q.931 message. I have a copy of both the ITU (Q.931) and Bellcore (TR-1268) specs. Neither (to my knowledge - almost positive on the Bellcore, fairly sure on the ITU) specifies II digit delivery. From Bellcore's perspective, II is part of ANI, and ANI is a inter-office thing. PRI is a customer to CO type of thing, so from the Bellcore (i.e. LEC) perspective, it isn't something that can be delivered and therefore isn't addressed in TR-1268. From the ITU's perspective, they only standardize things on an international level. I don't think that the II digits are an internationally standardized entity, so therefore the ITU leaves the standards for them up to the individual countries. Putting a PRI to an IXC is sort of crossing boundaries by using what has been standardized by Bellcore and the ITU as a "User to Network" (ie. Customer to LEC) interface (PRI) and sending Network to Network (ie. CO to CO) type information (ANI, II) over it. The only thing that might offer a LEC standard would be if there is a document out there describing FGD access to a LEC via PRI ... I've not seen such a beast. If it exists, perhaps someone else will say what it is?? Cya, Fred ------------------------------ From: oldbear@arctos.com (The Old Bear) Subject: Re: TWX/Telex, Realtime vs Store/Forward Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 12:41:10 -0500 Organization: The Arctos Group - http://www.arctos.com/arctos Mark J. Cuccia writes: X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 17, Issue 319, Message 1 of 10 > TWX and Telex were actually _realtime_ _circuit-switched_ _terminal-to- > terminal_ services. Within the _worldwide_ telex network (after all > countries were fully connected with each other for circuit-switched > connections), you dialed another Telex machine from your own Telex > machine, and you had a live realtime connection, and could even do > 'chats' back and forth by text-typing. In the early 1980s, I had the pleasure of working with a small investment firm that had installed 'office automation' consisting of an 8-user DEC PDP-8 mini-computer running a text-based word processing system called WPS-8. At the time, we used a lot of international telex to communicate with our overseas investor clients. This was done by having one of our secretaries laboriously typing lengthy messages (many with with a lot of tabular numberic data) into the paper tape punch of a Teletype Model 33 KSR connected to the Western Union TWX network. I decided that it would be nice if we could prepare documents on the word processing system and somehow get them into the TWX/Telex network without this laborious and error-prone re-keyboarding. The solution I cooked up at the time was to acquire an acoustical coupler and a standard Western Electric 500 rotary dial telephone set. The phone set was connected to the incoming TWX line which operated just like a POTS line as far as the phone was concerned. (The KSR 33 remained connected to receive incoming traffic.) I set the serial port on the computer to 110 baud (the data rate used by TWX), and wrote a small script to cause the word processor to recognize the Control-E (enquire) sent by other TWX devices and respond with our "answerback", a series of alphanumeric characters assigned by Western Union. The secretaries were instucted use the rotary dial phone to dial Western Union "Infomaster" or RCA Globecom (store-and-forward services), place the handset into the acoustical coupler, and press send on the word processor keyboard. The word processor software would then do the requisite handshaking and spool out the text at 110 baud. This system had the advantage of handling any issues of speed and code conversion when dealing with the telex network. Unfortunately, the delay in these store-and-forward systems could range from a couple of minutes to several hours. And a message could not be forwarded by Western Union or RCA Globecom until it had been completely received from us -- something which could take as long as a hour in the case of a large financial analysis with many lengthy tables of numbers and paragraphs of text. (These messages cost several hundred dollars to send!) When I attempted to use this approach with some of the real-time "International Record Carriers," I discovered that our computer would quickly overflow the IRC's buffer which handled the conversion from 110-baud ASCII TWX to the 50-baud 5-bit Baudot code of the international telex network. The reason for this overflow problem was that flow control on the TWX network was not handled by xon/xoff (Control-S/Control-Q, DC2/DC4) characters but by imposing a "restraint" signal on the TWX local loop -- something which was not passed to our computer by the jury-rigged telephone/acoustic-coupler connection. Finally, working with a technician from TRT Telecommunications, one of the smaller international record carriers, we discovered that we could pad each carriage-return/line-feed character with a series of NUL (ASCII 00) characters which would be ignored by TRT's ASCII-to-Baudot converter and would slow us down enough (from 110 baud!) to avoid overflowing their buffer. Of course, this was somewhat inefficient because the number of NULs sent was predicated upon a full 60-character wide line of text, but it allowed our sending in real-time, which was important to us on those occassions when we needed to have a foreign client receive the printed analysis at the same time that we were having a telephone conference with him. It's hard to even imagine 50-baud baudot code in this world of instantaneous email and fax, but it was only a few years ago that it was the dominant format for international text communication. Out of curiosity, does anyone have any biographical information about Emile Baudot, the engineer for whom baudot code -- and "baud" -- is named? Cheers, The Old Bear ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 11:09:54 -0500 (EST) From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: The Internet Will Swallow the Phone System Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg, N.Y. > It also must be remembered that Bell System stockholders gave up > many rights that a private company normally has. They could not > get rich the way Microsoft and Intel stockholders are. The rate > of return was sharply limited by state PUCs and the FCC. Further, > the pricing of service was controlled by the government. That's true, but they couldn't go broke the way U.S. Steel stockholders did, either. The government guaranteed a rate of return to telco stockholders which was and is an extremely valuable subsidy. > The phone company is also mandated to serve unprofitable/undesirable > customers. But not at a loss. The high-cost customers are averaged into the rate setting mix along with the low-cost ones. For the really high-cost ones there are very large USF subsidies. > Telephone service is a critical public utility. Years and years ago > society recognized its value and destructiveness of competitition in > this particular industry and established sensible controls. I agree there, the current competition fad is completely forgetting the public service aspects of telephony. I live in a tiny town served by a family owned independent telco, and although I think that the subsidies which let them offer flat rate service at $6.82/mo are a bit much, I'd hate to see them price rural service at cost and make a lot of the marginal farmers lose phone service. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 640 Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 ------------------------------ From: Telecom@LincMad.NOSPAM (Linc Madison) Subject: Re: Seven-Digit Cross-NPA Dialing Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 12:47:47 GMT Organization: LincMad Consulting; change NOSPAM to COM In article , Neal McLain wrote: > In Volume 17 Issue 316, Stan Schwartz asked: >> From the BellSouth Corporate web site, this is in conjunction >> with the upcoming North Carolina NPA splits. Aren't "protected >> exchanges" such as these what contribute to chewing up existing >> NPA's?? > Not necessarily: a cross-NPA-boundary NXX can be "protected" in one > part of an NPA and re-used elsewhere within the same NPA if two > conditions exist: (a) the local dialing plan requires 1+NPA+ for > intra-NPA long-distance, and (b) the two locations are separated by a > distance which requires long distance dialing to call from one to the > other. > An example. Up here in the frozen Midwest, we have the following > situation: > 608-326-xxxx Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin > 319-873-xxxx McGregor, Iowa -- local to Prairie du Chien > 608-873-xxxx Stoughton, Wisconsin -- long distance from P.d.C. > From Prairie du Chien, a caller dials: > 873-xxxx to reach McGregor > 1-608-873-xxxx to reach Stoughton > So in this case, 873 is "protected" within the Prairie du Chien > local calling area, but it's still used elsewhere within 608. The > fact that it's protected does not, in and of itself, prevent its > use elsewhere within the NPA. True. However, this situation has a high potential for confusion. Suppose I call Aunt Millie in Prairie du Chien and ask her for the number of her local widget dealer. She looks on her phone list and tells me "Oh, it's Acme Widgets at 873-xxxx," and doesn't think to tell me it's on the other side of the river. I know that Aunt Millie is in 608, so I dial 1-608-873-xxxx and expect to reach Acme Widgets. It also must wreak havoc with computer dialing lists (yet another reason that 1-NPA-NXX-XXXX must be allowed permissively on all calls irrespective of local/toll and irrespective of NPA). > This same technique can be used in North Carolina because North > Carolina already requires 1+NPA+ for intra-NPA long distance. The better solution, IMNSHO, is to require NPA+7D (or 1+NPA+7D in areas that don't use 1+ as a toll indicator) for FNPA local calls in such situations. The old seven-digit FNPA local arrangement should only be used in cases where both NPAs are sufficiently free to allow the affected exchanges to be *fully* protected. ** Do not send me unsolicited commercial e-mail spam of any kind ** Linc Madison * San Francisco, California * Telecom@LincMad-com URL:< http://www.lincmad.com > * North American Area Codes & Splits >> NOTE: if you autoreply, you must change "NOSPAM" to "com" << ------------------------------ From: Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 1997 21:46:08 EST Subject: Re: Seven-Digit Cross-NPA Dialing > From Prairie du Chien [which is in NPA 608], a caller dials: > 873-xxxx to reach McGregor: a cross-NPA local call which > can be dialed as 7 digits. > 1-608-873-xxxx to reach Stoughton: an intra-NPA long > distance which must be dialed as 11 digits. No wonder no one knows how to dial calls any more. I bet the folks in McGregor get a fair number of wrong number calls intended for Stoughton. Much has been written here in recent weeks about toll-alerting (1+ *required* on toll calls), permissive 1+ dialing (1+ *always* works, even on a cross-NPA local call, which can be dialed as just ten digits), anal-retentive toll alerting (1+ will not work on a cross-NPA local call; you can't dial 1+ unless you "mean it") and other similar topics, but this is a number IN YOUR OWN AREA CODE that you can't reach EXCEPT with 1+ ten digits, and if you dial it as seven digits it is assumed that you meant to make a cross-NPA call? That's insane. The only thing I've ever seen like it was the arrangement in Washington DC some years ago (also insane) where all of 202, and nearby parts of 301 (Maryland) and 703 (Virginia) were all seven-digits to each other. For example: From 301-571-XXXX (Hyattsville) to 202-466-XXXX (Washington) - seven digits From 301-571-XXXX to 301-466-XXXX (at the time, Baltimore) - 1+ ten digits In order to make this work, NNX codes assigned to 202 could not be reused in the "metro" portions of 301 *or* 703, and an NNX code assigned in the "metro" portion of *either* 301 or 703 could not be reused in the "metro" portion of the *other* NPA, nor in 202 AT ALL. Needless to say, a major waste of numbers. I think this scheme finally collapsed. Before the interchangeable NXX's came into existence, the one, immutable rule of dialing (at least here in what used to be 215-land) was YOU NEVER DIAL YOUR OWN AREA CODE. When 1+ seven digits became unworkable (because of "interchangeable" NXX's), Bell Atlunchtic went to seven digits anywhere in the area code, and for operator-assisted or -handled calls, 0 plus 215 and seven digits. You didn't dial "215" on any station-to-station call anywhere in this area code. You still don't. There always used to be a few places around here where they had cross-NPA local calling back in the days before area code boundaries started being measured in feet, instead of miles. New Hope, PA (215) to Trenton, NJ (609) was one; the Trenton NNX's were "protected" in 215, and vice-versa; the New Hopers dialed Trenton with seven digits only. I think they still have local calling between New Hope (still 215) and Trenton (still 609, at least this week), but now the Trenton NNX's have been assigned in 215, and New Hope dials ten digits (whether 1+ is either permitted or required, I dunno) to call Trenton. Bill ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 09:57:43 -0500 From: Mike Fox Reply-To: mikefox@ibm.net Subject: Re: Cell Phones,'Crime Fighters of the '90s,' Are Striking Out Lisa Hancock wrote: >> One technical study she commissioned for a lawsuit that she filed >> against L.A. Cellular, her service provider, indicates that the >> company's signal is still too weak to carry a 911 call in the area of >> National and Castle Heights -- > Oh, I see, a lawsuit. > While I'm certainly sorry for what happened, is it really the cellular > carrier's fault? The fault was the thieves -- they were the ones who > shot the woman. > Cellular phones do not always work. In my short experience with them, > I've been cut off in mid conversation and have had lots of trouble > getting a call through. It's a radio, and radios have dead spots. We, the telecom junkies or professionals understand this. But should every cell phone customer who hears an advertisement whose message is "get a cell phone for safety and peace of mind" know that? Cellular phone companies have been advertising their wares as safety devices for years without disclosing their limitations, some of which are intentional and completely within the control of the service providers (i.e., not allowing 911 calls to go through on a competitor's system, not having adequate coverage in dangerous areas where people are more likely to need their cell phones for saftey). In order to sign up paying customers, they led their customers to believe that they could count on their cell phones in an emergency when in fact this isn't true, partly because of business decisions they made, and they knew it. This is the tort they have committed. If they had not run all those ads saying that people should get cellular phones for their own peace of mind and safety, I would have more sympathy for them. However, I have seen several cell phone ads that tout safety and peace of mind. Nowhere did they say "subject to limited availability" or "subject to blocking for economic reasons" or some such. An analogy would be anti-lock brakes. If a car company sells a car without anti-lock brakes and without claiming they had them, they would not be liable for the lack of antilock brakes. But if they sold a car that had anti-lock brakes, and made the added safety a big selling point, but intentionally crippled them in some way without disclosing that fact, and that crippling resulted in a failure to prevent an accident, would they not have committed a tort? > Suppose the woman stopped at a conventional pay phone, found it > broken, and then was assaulted. Would the phone company be then > liable? Only if the pay phone company had aggressively advertised itself as a device for safety and peace of mind, and led the woman to believe she could count on it in an emergency. >> Instead, many wireless companies favor their own customers by >> deliberately blocking 911 calls made on their own signals by callers >> using competitors' phones, by out-of-towners, or by users of phones >> that have never been activated by a commercial service (so-called >> non-initialized phones). > Is the above really true? Sounds pretty far fetched to me. And if it is true, then you would agree that there is a basis for the lawsuit? This part that you are calling far fetched is the crux of the lawsuit, I believe (this case was also profiled on Prime Time Live and this was a big part of it). Hmmm, maybe it's not so frivilous after all. Mike ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V17 #325 ******************************