Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id NAA04144; Thu, 27 Nov 1997 13:45:12 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 27 Nov 1997 13:45:12 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199711271845.NAA04144@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V17 #332 TELECOM Digest Thu, 27 Nov 97 13:45:00 EST Volume 17 : Issue 332 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Help Needed With Fusitsu of Japan (Tri Nguyen) FCC Payphone Surcharge: Revenge of the Liberals (Eli Mantel) TIE PBX Help Needed (Jacob Westfall) Sprint Service Level Response Problems (wdg@hal-pc.org) New York City's New AC Also an Exchange in Neighboring 201 (Robert Casey) Re: Payphone Operator Compensation for Coinless Calls (Ron Kritzman) Re: Bulletproof 888 Number? (Leonard Erickson) Re: Bulletproof 888 Number? (Andrew Olechny) Re: Monopolies and Microeconomics (John R. Levine) Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux. (H. Peter Anvin) Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux. (Earle Robinson) Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux. (Peter Morgan) Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux. (re-redux?) (Bill Levant) Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux. (Scott Robert Dawson) Re: LEC Emergency-Break Capability (Connie Curts) A Funny Thing Happened Calling 1-800-CALL-ATT (Robb Topolski) 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. The URL is: http://telecom-digest.org They can also be accessed using anonymous ftp: ftp hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) A third method is the Telecom Email Information Service: Send a note to archives@telecom-digest.org to receive a help file for using this method or write me and ask for a copy of the help file for the Telecom Archives. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. 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: CTY.ASA@bdvn.vnmail.vnd.net (Tri Nguyen) Date: Thu, 27 Nov 1997 17:05:07 +0700 Subject: Help Needed With Fusitsu of Japan Hello, My name is Nguyen and I am from VietNam. I am very interested in the telecomunication products of Fusitsu Inc., Japan. However, I have not got too much documents about them. I am especially searching for information about them. If anyone can help me, I would be very thankful. Yours, Tri Nguyen Ho Chi Minh City, VietNam Tel 84-8-8458941 ------------------------------ From: Eli Mantel Subject: FCC Payphone Surcharge: Revenge of the Liberals Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 23:28:33 PST From the FCC Brochure "Calls Made From Payphones": > Some long distance companies are advising consumers that the > FCC decided that consumers making calls from payphones should > pay a per-call charge to compensate the PSP. The FCC did not > make such a decision. This doublespeak from the FCC is topped only by the ridiculous claim that there is a dearth of payphones that results from inadequate payphone operator compensation, or the suggestion that customers in a mall or an airport will be able to find a cheaper payphone just around the corner. But the whining about this fee (and I'm one of those whiners) is masking the truth as to what this fee is all about: the revenge of the liberals. Deregulation, as we all know, is the darling idea of conservatives, and generally detested by liberals. This plan for compensating payphone providers provides compensation to the payphone operator, but also provides unlimited employment at an hourly rate well above the current minimum wage, for as many people as the payphone operators care to hire. There's no rule that says payphones must actually be public phones. Depending on the state tariffs, you can probably put payphones anywhere you can put regular phones. To simplify things, payphones don't even need to be coin phones. They just have to have a way to pay for non-toll-free calls. As far as I can tell, a payphone operator can install hundreds of payphones in a room and hire people to make calls from his payphones to airlines, hotels, and the many thousands of businesses offering their services via 800/888 numbers. Based on one minute per call, the payphone operator can earn $17 per hour per employee. If he only pays half of that to the employees, they will be getting well over the current minimum wage. Since just about anybody can make phone calls, this will become the de facto minimum wage. To put the icing on the cake for the liberals, it will be primarily the big, bad, businesses who are stuck paying the wages of these employees who are causing the wages of their own minimum-wage employees to be increased. And before long, payphone operators generating income for themselves through this technique will be testifying before the FCC that any changes to the regulations would unfairly impact their industry, an industry which is making very significant contributions to the U.S. economy. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This is a very interesting proposal. Anyone want to try installing phones in the manner desribed and see if it actually works? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Jacob Westfall Subject: TIE PBX Help Needed Date: 26 Nov 1997 16:36:53 GMT Organization: Electro-Byte Technologies Hi, I have a couple of questions about a TIE VDS PBX and was hoping someone had used this type of system before. First off, a call comes in with the call id or CLID info, and an extension takes the call. When you transfer the call to another extension will the PBX resend the CLID info to that new extension? Will any type of analog PBX work with Call ID (CLID)? Second, if you are using centrex lines as trunk lines into the PBX can you program the PBX to ignore a flash-hook so that you can pass the flash-hook through to the telco's centrex system to perform centrex functions? Ie. to transfer a call off-site using the centrex system and not tie up a PBX trunk? Third, if you are adding an ACD system to the PBX and one of the agents is tele-working and their local extension is call-forwarding to their house, can the ACD detect their line is busy and continue to queue a call for them? Thanks for any help you can provide, jake@ebtech.net ------------------------------ From: wdg@hal-pc.org Subject: Sprint Service Level Response Problems Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 01:57:34 GMT Reply-To: wdg@hal-pc.org How long is too long to wait to have a 12-channel trunk group expanded to 24 channels? What's reasonable and what's unreasonable? Is 23 days unreasonable? I think so. How long does it really take to expand a 12-channel (digital) trunk group to 24 (digital) channels on the DMS-250? Ten minutes maybe? I currently have seven SPRINT channelized voice T1s along with several 'full T1' (non-channelized) spans. I'm nowhere near being a "major" SPRINT account, though my Sprint billings are approaching $80,000 a month. I think that should at least entitle me to a higher level of service than waiting and begging for three weeks to have this trunk group expanded. I think my SPRINT account rep (initials RG) has his head up his ass. He has my order so incredibly FUBAR'd that no one can figure it out. The span is in place. The trunks are there ... 12 channels of the span in question are sitting idle WAITING for SPRINT to begin delivering traffic to them. The other twelve channels of =THAT SPAN= are already in the trunk group I've been fervently trying to get these remaining twelve trunks added to for the last three doggone weeks. Why is this so difficult? This is a no-brainer folks. All I need is for the size of the trunk group to grow from 12 to 24. What is the hold-up? If anyone from SPRINT is following along and can do any arm-twisting, the SPRINT switch number is 130 (Satsuma) and the trunk group is 2376. This is not a FANTM group and I do *not* wish it to become one. Just add 12 more channels configured exactly as the other 12, including inband (DTMF) ANI/DNIS. Deliver these additional 12 to me over the same span as the other 12 are using ... the channel capacity is there, idle and waiting, as it has been for the last 23 days. ------------------------------ From: wa2ise@netcom.com (Robert Casey) Subject: New York City's New AC Also an Exchange in Neighboring 201 Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 22:31:21 GMT Turns out new nanp 646 for New York City is an exchange in immediately adjacent 201's 646 exchange in Hackensack NJ. I thought the phone system wants to avoid using an area code number that is the same as an exchange in the new area code or in immediately adjacent area codes. Of course, maybe no number exists like that in the New York City area. My brother works for the county government of Bergen County, and almost all their office lines are in exchange 646. He wonders how many wrong numbers they're gonna get from people forgetting the leading "1" when dialing New York's new 646 area code. Also means we can't have 1 + 7D dialing for same area code toll calls. ------------------------------ From: Ron Kritzman Subject: Re: Payphone Operator Compensation for Coinless Calls Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 17:09:38 GMT Stanley Cline wrote: > These explicit pass-along policies are going to result in at least > some businesses, especially paging companies (see post about SkyTel > earlier this week), blocking their 800/888 numbers from payphones. Its already started, and its probably going to get worse. A business which recieves a large number of short calls will be massacred by these charges. Take the case of a voicemail or paging provider with an 800 + pin number for system users to check their messages. A 30 second call on a dedicated circuit probably costs them no more than three cents. The 30 cent pay phone fee results in a (pause for gasp) -- thousand percent -- increase in the cost of that call. Of course they will pass this on to their customers, and what was once an economical way to do business (an 800 pager or voicemail) has suddenly turned into a prohibitively expensive one. Sadly, I can envision the day when it becomes nearly impossible to reach an 800 from a pay phone. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: See Eli Mantel's article elsewhere in this issue for an excellent way to make all this painfully obvious to the FCC and others. PAT] ------------------------------ From: shadow@krypton.rain.com (Leonard Erickson) Subject: Re: Bulletproof 888 Number? Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 01:56:40 PST Organization: Shadownet > I think he *is* getting real time ANI. I called out of curiosity and > the recording stated that if I was calling to complain because I > received an email I should hang up else they would capture my number > and feature it at the top of one of their ads as a contact for the > company. (Cute.) Gee. That *threat* may be just what it takes to get him in hot water. I seriously doubt that threatening to do that is legal. Leonard Erickson (aka Shadow) shadow@krypton.rain.com <--preferred leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com <--last resort [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It depends on if you plan to follow up your threat of (legal) action by taking that (legal) action. It is illegal for me to threaten to harrass you because you harassed me, just as it is always illegal to commit the same crime against the offender that the offender committed against you. There certainly is nothing wrong with saying "if you commit a crime against me and hurt me I intend to sue you or ask the government to prosecute you." PAT] ------------------------------ From: ccoprao@acmex.gatech.edu (Andrew Olechny) Subject: Re: Bulletproof 888 Number? Date: 25 Nov 1997 09:57:57 GMT Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology Derek Balling (dredd@megacity.org) wrote: > 'Bullet-proof' 800# : > 1-888-809-2578 When I tried this number at 4:30 am, all I could get was the 'all circuits are busy' message, and every fifth time or so a robo-voice saying 'error 53'. I'm curious what error 53 is and where it is generated. Andrew ------------------------------ Date: 25 Nov 1997 03:49:07 -0000 From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: Monopolies and Microeconomics Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg, N.Y. > I am by no means protected against loss of my investment. The Penn > Central railroad was a public utility, with its rates and services > defined by the government, yet investors lost their money. There have > been plenty of utility investors who lost money. As I recall, Penn Central collapsed after dereg. And neither the NYC nor the Pennsy was anything like a monopoly except in very small geographic areas. Indeed, for most of the century they were each other's strongest competitors. > If I buy a quart of milk, the price is clearly marked on the shelf. Hey, you want to know about anti-consumer price regulated monopoly, you should learn about dairy price supports. > For the moment, "competition" in the phone industry is a joke. You > can't choose if you don't know what it's costing you. For dial-1 long distance, I think that competition works pretty well, even though an amazing fraction of people go for wierd deals with incomprehensible prices. My IXC charges the same flat rate at all times, anywhere in the U.S., a pricing scheme that is pretty easy to understand. Calling card rates are similarly simple, although starting this month there's a 29 cent/call surcharge for calls from payphones due to the new 800 charge. For pay phones, I agree that dereg has for the most part been a disaster. It's kind of the same as the problem with medical insurance -- the people using the service and paying the bills are different from and often at odds with the ones choosing the providers and negotiating the prices. 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: hpa@transmeta.com (H. Peter Anvin) Subject: Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux. Date: 26 Nov 1997 21:43:22 GMT Organization: Transmeta Corporation, Santa Clara CA Reply-To: hpa@transmeta.com (H. Peter Anvin) shadow@krypton.rain.com (Leonard Erickson) wrote in newsgroup comp.dcom.telecom: > And when telemarketers and survey takers call the cellular owner, > should he have to pay for those *unwanted* calls? And what about wrong > numbers? One thing I like about the Pac*Bell PCS phone I have is that they don't charge for incoming calls which last less than a minute. 60 seconds is plenty of time to get rid of wrong numbers and telemarketers (I have gotten the former, and I'm *STILL* getting wrong numbers for some "Esquio Alvarez" on my land line -- after three years. It is some form of "OUT OF AREA" scum, but they seem more argumentative than most telemarketers -- "I know this is the number, it worked in 1994", so I wonder if it is collection agencies or scammers. My bet is on the latter.) hpa PGP: 2047/2A960705 BA 03 D3 2C 14 A8 A8 BD 1E DF FE 69 EE 35 BD 74 See http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/ for web page and full PGP public key I am Bahai -- ask me about it or see http://www.bahai.org/ "To love another person is to see the face of God." -- Les Miserables [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Interesting you mention it. I've had some woman call my number for three or four years now, on an average of once or twice a month and ask to speak with 'Cathy'. She does not understand the phrase 'wrong number' -- apparently has no idea what it means. I used to be at least a little gracious about it with her but for the past several months when she calls I've simply just put the receiver back on the hook without saying anything to her. Now and again she calls a second time immediatly following, annoyed that 'someone' hung up on her, and I just hang up a second time. I've not yet had three in a row from her. I've gone from speaking kindly to her to being somewhat abrupt and discourteous to being downright vile; nothing worked so now I just hang up as quickly as I hear her ask for 'Cathy'. Then several years ago (early eighties) I had this dear little old lady call my (wrong) number from a payphone four or five times in a row one day. She called on my modem line and got the expected result when the modem answered. She turned me in to repair service; called them to report she was dialing my (wrong) number, and each time it answered there was 'a lot of noise on the line, and she did not understand what was wrong ...' The repair guy for the central office I was in at the time called to tell me about it and we both had a good laugh. Then as icing on the cake, the lady asked to be notified when the line was 'repaired' and asked the business office to refund the four quarters she had used to try to call me. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 17:14:26 -0500 From: earle robinson Subject: Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux >> One big reason you see many Americans with both a pager and cell phone >> is because of the ridiculous method used for call charges in the >> states. No one with a cell phone here would bother having a pager, >> too. > I suspect a bigger reason is the pager receives signals just about > anywhere. Cell phones -- at least here in NYC -- have problems inside > buildings, in rural areas, etc. My new PCS does it, my old analog did > it, it's a signal problem and it happens to my friends as well. > However, aside from tunnels (subway and car), my pager always works. > I would never _depend_ on my cell phone for communication. Here in Paris my GSM works in most buildings, and where it might not, any incoming calls go into the voice mailbox, which is free. So, why have a pager? It also works in tunnels, other than the under the English Channel between France and the UK. We'll have service in the subway next year I am told. I have omnipoint GSM in New York and I find it works in buildings. er ------------------------------ From: Peter Morgan Subject: Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux. Date: Thu, 27 Nov 1997 08:40:00 GMT The message from Rishab Aiyer Ghosh contains these words: > The first case our newly formed regulator had to deal with this year > was when the Dept of Telecom (which effectively retains a land-line > monopoly until private competitors build their wireline networks next > year) decided to charge its users extra for calls to cellphones. The > cellphone ops screamed that their customers dropped by 50%. The > regulator ruled in their favour. As with Norway and some other European countries, it is very much a Caller pays situation. Over the next few years, all mobile/paging/ follow-me [personal number] services will be moving to an 07 prefix. The UK caller pays the same, whether recipient in UK or abroad (when the recipient is stung for the international leg), again like Norway. Essentially there'll be a small number of prefixes which classify all numbers:- 01xxx geographic [by town/city] 02xxx geographic [by region] 05xxx businesses [those with large call-centres, DDI etc whether situated in one place or using some digits to route to regional centres] 07xxx mobile/pager/personal 08xxx special rates [ 0800 - free, 0845 - local, 0870 - national] 09xxx premium services info lines/entertainment [comp./adult] There are a number of different rates which can reach mobile phones, depending on the network being used. At least one network allows a customer to have a geographic type number which reaches their mobile. This means I could have a central London number even though I live 200 miles away, and callers would have no clue that I had no office there ... they'd pay whatever rate they normally paid [local if they were one of the eight million living in the region] and I'd pay some additional setup fee. Other services are offered where the user pays a lower rate than they would to a mobile, and the recipient pays the excess. Of course, I could have an 0800 number routed to my landline, and divert that to my mobile if I was really wanting to pay for their calls :-( I use my 07050 number as a disincentive for certain salespeople -- if they do ring me, I get to see the id, and the call costs up to 9x the rate for a national call. Sometimes their switch will have my code barred anyway :-) Clients get my 0800 number to my landline. Peter Morgan, N Wales, UK. http://www.uk-places.org/07numbers.html [details of UK "follow me" or "personal" numbers, like US 500 ??] ------------------------------ From: Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 04:55:04 EST Subject: Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument redux (re-redux?) Quoth the Shadow: > There's a reason why the standard rule (before cellular) was that the > *caller* always paid any charges unless the callee had consented to pay > them (Enterprise & Zenith numbers, 800 numbers, etc). > It wasn't carried over to cellular in the US because they thought that > it'd make cellular phones less popular if people had to pay to call > them. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But I don't think it applied on mobile > radio phone calls prior to cellular either did it? In the old service > called AMPS, weren't the charges always paid by the radiotelephone > owner and not the caller? Likewise, the old 'ship to shore' radio > service to vessels on the Great Lakes and in rivers, etc. The > (landline or wired) caller never paid extra for those. PAT] I think the *real* reason why US cellular users pay for incoming calls (and the calling parties don't) is that (except perhaps in 917-land, also known as NYC) callers can't tell whether a given number is assigned to a cellular phone or not just by looking at the NPA-NXX combination. As things now stand, you can tell what a call will cost just from knowing its NPA and NXX. Caller-pays cellular would louse up that scheme, because calls to *some* numbers in an NPA would cost more than others. Worse, since cellular prefixes aren't uniformly assigned from one NPA to another, a given NXX might be cellular only in one NPA, landline only in another, and split between the two in a third. How the blazes will IXC's be able to figure out what to charge callers? If memory serves, the old mobile-phones were hooked into plain old POTS lines. Same argument holds; how would you have been able to know you were calling a mobile? I have no problem with "callee pays" billing; to me, it's fairly simple: a) the standard scheme (for better or for worse) in the US is *caller pays*; b) in a "caller pays" world, the caller can price the call from the NPA-NXX; c) cellular is of necessity more expensive per minute than landline; d) I chose the more expensive service for my own convenience; therefore e) in order to keep the cost of a call predictable, any charge over and above standard NPA-NXX rates must be absorbed by the callee. This last is similar to the problem with the old NPA 809 international points. Used to be, you could recognize an international call from the 809 NPA; now, with so many new NPA's in the Caribbean, it's considerably more difficult. The problem arises from people's expectations -- if they dial 1-NPA-NXX-XXXX, then they expect to pay domestic rates. Caller-pays cellular would only aggravate that problem. The *real* solution is cellular-only NPA's, but the FCC's against it, and it would be a tremendous waste of NPA codes. Maybe when we go to 8 digit local numbers (or 4-digit NPA's), the cellular numbers can be segregated. THEN, and ONLY THEN, caller-pays might make sense. Bill ------------------------------ From: sunspace@interlog.com.antispamtext (Scott Robert Dawson) Subject: Re: The Old Who Pays Cellular Argument, redux. Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 03:08:59 GMT Organization: Interlog Internet Services On 23 Nov 1997 15:53:43 +0100, naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber) wrote: [discussion of caller-pays cellular snipped] > The most natural way to handle all this would be to let the market > decide. Offer caller pays, callee pays, and split charge service, and > see how it develops from there. Assuming that people are egoistical, I > would expect this to converge quickly into a general acceptance of > "caller pays" with only few exceptions along the lines of current 0800 > numbers. I agree. I suspect that this whole situation developed differently in North America and Europe because of the distances inside the countries, and was only later reflected in different numbering. In North America, because Canada and the USA are large enough to require significant amounts of internal "long-distance" calling, mobile phones are considered to be "based" in a particular location, and are given numbers in the same area code(s) as landlines based in the same location. Other users call the cellphone number as if it was a landline in the same location. (It is 7100 km from Saint John's Newfoundland to Victoria, British Columbia- the Trans-Canada Highway.) If a mobile user is far from eir home area, ey will pay a long-distance fee for carriage of the call *from* eir home area, just as a caller would pay long-distance on a call *to* that area. This leads to situations where one person calls another over a distance which would be a local call, but the person being called is using a mobile with a number in a far distant city, so the caller pays long-distance to the mobile number, and the callee (with the mobile) pays long-distance on the call as well, because it is coming from the distant city. This is the reason for the North American analog networks' "roamer-access numbers". When a caller knows he is local to the callee's mobile, but the callee's mobile number is a long-distance call, hy will dial a local "roamer-access number" to get into the cellular carrier's network, receive another dial tone, then dial the mobile number. The call is then routed directly to the mobile, avoiding two long-distance hops. Of course, if the mobile is not local to the roamer-access number, the *callee* pays the long-distance charges from the location of the roamer access number. On the other hand, a caller dialing *out* on a North American mobile experiences the same local/long-distance calling patterns as a landline in the same location. In Europe and other locations, I suspect that the countries are small enough that potential long-distance charges to mobiles (incurred by routing calls across the country to mobiles that could be anywhere) could be 'smoothed out' across all the people calling the mobiles, without raising the rates for calls to mobiles to completely-unaffordable levels. This allowed mobiles to be placed in separate easily-recognized area codes covering entire countries, with a fixed rate to call them no matter where they were in the country. (Am I right on this, Europeans? Also, in Europe, is calling a mobile in another country more expensive than calling one in the same country?) When I had my Bell Mobility analogue cellphone, I had two numbers: a regular +1 416 809 XXXX number, and a caller-pays +1 600 245 (I think) XXXX number. The first number was geographically-based (in Toronto), and I paid long-distance on incoming calls to it if I was far enough away from the Toronto area. The second number was not geographically-based and I never paid long-distance for incoming calls no matter where I or the caller was in Canada. Callers to that area code got an intercept that stated that they were calling a mobile number and they would be charged so much a minute (95c, I think, I might be wrong), and were given a chance to hang up. Thanks to the efforts of such luminaries as Mark J. Cuccia and others on this newsgroup, I know that area code 600 is a bit of an anomaly in the North American Numbering Plan (translation: the FCC wouldn't allow it). I know that it couldn't be dialed from the Dallas, Texas area (+1 972 618 XXXX) -- I got my cousin to try it. I'm not sure whether it could be dialed from *Canadian* points outside of Bell Mobility's analogue territory. I must add that I still paid airtime on incoming calls to either number. Of course, now that I have a GSM mobile phone from Fido, there are no roamer access numbers for the GSM net. Not a problem as long as I remain in the Toronto area, but this seems to be GSM's only major billing-type disadvantage. GSM-experts, is there any equivalent to North American "roamer-access numbers" on GSM networks? Then again, in January I'll be getting a dual-mode GSM-1900/AMPS phone that can roam on Bell Mobility's analogue network. I'll have to find out whether I can use Bell Mobility's roamer-access numbers with my Fido phone. Of course, that wouldn't help me if I and my local caller were both in, say, England ... I think North America could use a couple of nation-wide (or even NANP-wide) area codes for mobiles ... let's have a choice. The new competition between the PCS networks in the Toronto area has driven the costs of mobile phones down to the point that they can be almost as cheap as landlines ... as long as you don't talk too much and use up your provided "free" airtime. Long-distance charges are often cheaper than those on the landlines; during business days I pay 15c/minute on Fido and 43 cents/minute on Bell, even including Bell's discount. On the other hand, Bell is cheaper at night. ** PCS= "fancy digital cellphone"; there are four companies competing in Toronto: one using GSM at 1900 MHz, one using TDMA at 800 MHz, and two using CDMA at 1900 MHz. >> even more importantly from a personal privacy standpoint, that I should >> even have to tell them it's a cellphone at _all_? With North American cellular exchanges mixed in among the landline exchanges in each area code, there's no way to tell unless you live in a particular area long enough to start recognizing the exchange numbers. On the other hand, separate nation-wide mobile-only numbering ranges like area code 600 in Canada more-or-less shout, "this is a cellphone!". > From a privacy standpoint, every call to a cellphone should start out > with a message "important notice: this is a call to a wireless service, > remember that anybody can listen in". Analogue: snoopers can listen in with a 150-dollar illegally-modified scanner from Radio Shack. Digital: GSM, TDMA, CDMA: snoopers would need about 100 000 dollars worth of test equipment from Hewlett-Packard just to easily receive the signal, then they'd have to decode it ... Scott Robert Dawson Note: remove the characters .antispamtext from this address to get my real address... ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 22:51:06 CST From: Connie Curts Subject: Re: LEC Emergency-Break Capability LECs have been able to directly access lines on the cable pair since the 1980s when I was still working at the 'phone factory.' However, it is the repair department that used to do this, not the operator assistance group. Perhaps you should call the number to 'report a problem on your line' and ask them if they could do this for you if there is ever another emergency. Connie Curts ccurts@unicom.net ------------------------------ From: Robb Topolski Subject: A Funny Thing Happened Calling 1-800-CALL-ATT Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 00:15:45 -0800 Calling from the local baby-bell (GTE) owned coin phone in Hillsboro, OR, I was answering a page when I realized I didn't have any coinage to feed it. So I dial 1-800-CALL-ATT except it didn't "feel right." Suspecting that I probably misdialed, I waited to hear what would come up on the line. A close-but-no-cigar female recording came on the line asking for my destination phone number. I hung up. I had apparently dialed 1-800-228-8288 (1-800-CATT-ATT) instead of 1-800-225-5288 (1-800-CALL-ATT). It's an easy misdial. Beware. Robb Topolski rmt@bigfoot.com ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V17 #332 ******************************