Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id IAA10973; Tue, 16 Dec 1997 08:22:51 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 16 Dec 1997 08:22:51 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199712161322.IAA10973@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V17 #348 TELECOM Digest Tue, 16 Dec 97 08:22:00 EST Volume 17 : Issue 348 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Tulsa Bank Error Sends Calls to Wrong Number (Tad Cook) Sprint False Information - Don't Use Sprint! (Diana Fruguglietti) Pac*Bell Announces 661 as New NPA for 805 Split (Mark J. Cuccia) Minneapolis/St.Paul NPA Relief (Mark J. Cuccia) Re: Let Local Competitors Build Their Own Local Loop Plant (Lee Winson) Re: Let Local Competitors Build Their Own Local Loop Plant (M. Hayworth) Re: Let Local Competitors Build Their Own Local Loop Plant (Joseph Singer) Re: MCI Cancels Toll-Free Service in California (Dave Stott) 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. 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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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Tulsa Bank Error Sends Calls to Wrong Number Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 01:31:08 PST From: tad@ssc.com (Tad Cook) Phone Dialing Trouble Glitch Hits Home for Tulsa, Okla., Couple By Dan Rutherford, Tulsa World, Okla. Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News Dec. 12--Bank One Oklahoma may not be able to tell you how many customer complaints they received from their weekend conversion, but Debi and Mark Allen probably can. The Allens' answering machine recorded most of them. When Liberty Bank & Trust Co. began its conversion to Bank One at the close of business Friday, it shut down its regular customer service 800-number. Instead of a menu of options, the system played a message directing Tulsa customers to call Bank One for help. However, the message forgot to tell customers the phone number was in the 405 area code. The Allens have the same number in the 918 area code. "It started Friday afternoon. But I just blew it off. There were only five or six calls," Debi Allen said. "My husband thought it was kind of fun -- they thought we were the bank. Then around 6 p.m. it just hit and it wasn't fun anymore." Mark Allen finally asked an irritated customer how he got his home phone number and called the bank to remedy the problem. However, the mistake couldn't be fixed until Monday. "Over the weekend we unplugged it (the telephone). It was that bad," Debi Allen said. "I plugged it back in Monday because I had to make some calls and got about 50 more. People over the weekend must have written the number down because they are still calling." Spurring the calls were a couple of glitches in Bank One's ATM switchover. And all of the bank's branches were closed Saturday for the conversion. "I'm passing along the gripes and complaints," Debi Allen said jokingly. "Really, it's just one of those deals where mistakes happen. They were very apologetic and worked with us. I couldn't have asked for people to be nicer," Debi Allen said. Bank One spokesman Joe Bowles said, "We apologized profusely and got the problem fixed immediately. "We were embarrassed by the mistake and hope our customers realized that in a conversion of this magnitude thousands of things went right. Only a couple of things went wrong. If we inconvenienced anyone we are very apologetic," Bowles said. ----------------------- [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have mentioned here in the past how I had the same thing happen in 1974 when an old SxS office in Chicago was cut over to ESS. My number was 312-WEbster-9-4600 and the number for the switchboard at Sears' Credit Department was WAbash-2-4600. Calls from one single southwest side central office in in Chicago were directed to me due to a programming error in the central office and for a day or so I was bombarded with calls for Sears -- I probably got several hundred before it was corrected. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 09:45:42 -0500 From: Diana Fruguglietti Reply-To: diana@kronos.com Subject: Sprint False Information - Don't Use Sprint! I have been scanning this newsgroup and found that I am not alone in my billing disagreements with Sprint! I had Sprint as my long distance carrier and saw an advertisement on TV about free Monday night calls between 7pm - 11pm. Since I did not have any written confirmation of this I decided to call their sales number to verify if this was really true, prior to making any calls. This happened back in early November. I called and the woman I spoke with confirmed that yes this was true. I asked about the 403 area code (Canada) and she said it was included. She said all other times would be .10 / minute evenings and .25 day rate. I said great. She also said the promotion ran through Dec. 29th. Therefore I made my calls and talked for 40 minutes to Canada. To my astonishment, I just received my bill and was billed for $40.00 - $1 / minute!! I called to get this fixed and they said that I had to sign up for the free Monday nights and that Canada was not even included!!! The sales- person never mentioned this. They wouldn't budge. Obviously they do not care about their customers! They will LIE to get you to make phone calls and then charge you exorbitant rates. I told them I would switch carriers and post this information on the internet. It didn't phase them one bit! If anyone has since got their bill adjusted, please email me with how you did it. I will never use Sprint again. I can't wait until they call to find out why I switched companies! -Diana [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No Diana, you are not alone. There are lots of other readers here similarly situated. This has been an ongoing discussion here for at least a few years now, going back to when Sprint was offering free modems to new customers and then continuing through the days of the 'Friday Free' promotion. The rules were changed on both of those promotions mid-stream also, or if the rules were always in effect, they were not explained very well. If you recall with 'Friday Free', new customers were told they would get all their calls free every Friday for one year; then all of a sudden certain types of calls were no longer free (once the customer had made the call he found this out of course). Sprint even included the name and phone number of a representative who was assigned to specifically answer questions about the change in the promotion ... ... lots of readers here remember that! This guy never once was able to be contacted. He was always 'in a meeting all day' or 'stepped away from his desk for a few minutes' or 'on another call', but never available to answer calls from customers about the letter *he sent out under his own name* saying that the 'Friday Free' program was being modified. You knew of course that the name 'Sprint' goes back to the days when the Southern Pacific Railroad started the company. The railroad decided in the middle to late 1970's that they needed to upgrade their internal network communications. Where they had been operating with wires on poles strung along the side of their railroad tracks all over the USA, they decided to install a 'modern' (for the 1970's) microwave network. When the new system was in place, they had lots of excess capacity and decided to sell the excess to other companies to help pay for the new network. The name given to the new entity was outhern

acific ailroad nternal etwork elecommunications. It was sometimes spelled out S.P.R.I.N.T. and sometimes people said the word 'sprint' instead. Like CARE (Committee on American Relief in Europe), ZIP codes (Zone Improvement Plan) and a few others, people have long since forgotten the original words and prefer to just pronounce the abbreviation as a word in and of itself. Sprint of course has not been owned by the railroad for many, many years, and they switched from business customers only to business and residence many years ago. While on this topic, I'll mention that MCI means 'Microwave Communications, Incorporated', which was the original name of the company when it was a storefront operation selling/repairing radio equipment in Joliet, Illinois in the middle 1960's. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 12:40:50 -0600 From: Mark J. Cuccia Subject: Pac*Bell Announces 661 as New NPA for 805 Split Pac*Bell's website has a notice dated 8-December-1997, announcing the final boundaries in the forthcoming split of NPA 805 (Southern California area to the north of Los Angeles metro), as well as the digits of the new code (NPA 661), as well as permissive/mandatory dialing dates. http://www.pactel.com/cgi-bin/getrel?1608 The coastal area of current NPA 805 will retain 805 (Ventura and northwestward). The interior area of current NPA 805 (including Bakersfield) will change to 661. Permissive dialing 13 Feb 1999. Mandatory dialing 14 Aug 1999. Through 13 Nov 1999 (for three months after 661 becomes mandatory), calls to the affected areas (now in 661) but dialed as 805 instead of 661 will reach an intercept indicating that particular number has changed from NPA 805 to NPA 661. After 13 Nov 1999, I assume that Pac*Bell (or the new NANPA, Lockheed-Martin) will begin assigning new 805-NXX and 661-NXX prefixes exclusively for their respective regions. There was nothing on the website announcing what the NPA 661 test verification number will be. Also, elsewhere in Pac*Bell's website, it is mentioned that Nevada's 702 NPA will split in 1998. There are no further details, although I understand that the southern part of Nevada (Las Vegas, etc) which is mostly Sprint-Centel will retain 702. The northern part of Nevada (Reno, Carson City, Sparks, Virginia City, etc) which is SBC/Pac*Tel's Nevada*Bell (and other small local independent telcos) will be changing to a new yet-to-be-announced NPA code. One thing we know for certain is that the new (northern) Nevada NPA code will _NOT_ be 711 nor 777. MARK_J._CUCCIA__PHONE/WRITE/WIRE/CABLE:__HOME:__(USA)__Tel:_CHestnut-1-2497 WORK:__mcuccia@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu|4710-Wright-Road|__(+1-504-241-2497) Tel:UNiversity-5-5954(+1-504-865-5954)|New-Orleans-28__|fwds-on-no-answr-to Fax:UNiversity-5-5917(+1-504-865-5917)|Louisiana(70128)|cellular/voicemail- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 09:31:33 -0600 From: Mark J. Cuccia Subject: Minneapolis/St.Paul NPA Relief On Thursday, my friend in Minneapolis told me that local radio/TV/print/ news/media mentioned that either 651 or 952 will be the new NPA code for St.Paul MN and nearby communities east of the Mississippi River. It was mentioned that Lockheed-Martin (the new North American telephone numbering administrator) and USWest will make the 'official' formal announcement in February 1998. I don't think that any 'exact' dates of activation (permissive/manda- tory) were announced, except that the new code will be needed in summer, 1998. Whatever the split code for St.Paul will be (either 651 or 952), the other code will be for further relief (at some future date) for Minneapolis and west of the river metro area communities, which for now will retain the 612 NPA code. (Hopefully, by that time, they could do an overlay with full mandatory ten-digit local dialing, as Atlanta metro will be doing, and possibly Chicago metro might be doing throughout next year). The local dial format for Minneapolis/St.Paul metro with this forthcoming split, from what I've been told, will be ... Home-NPA local: seven-digits and permissive ten-digits Adjacent/Nearby-NPA local: mandatory ten-digits All toll (including home NPA, if there is any toll within the 'same' NPA): mandatory 1+ten-digits 10(1X)XXX+ can be prefixed first to use different carriers All operator/card/etc. special billing, same or differing NPA: mandatory 0+ten-digits 10(1X)XXX+ can be prefixed first to use different carriers This seems similar to the existing dialing plans in use in Seattle and Atlanta. Boston metro has a similar dialing plan, although permissive 1+ before ten-digits for both home and nearby NPA local calls is also allowed in eastern MA -- I don't think that Seattle and Atlanta allow a permissive 1+ before any ten-digit local call. The forthcoming split will cause some problems, as there are areas near the Mississippi River, on each side, which are served out of c/o switches and NXX codes from the opposite side. I don't know if these "pocket area" customers will have to be renumbered right away, or if USWest is going to have to 'duplicate' NXX codes in both NPA codes. During the state regulatory hearings, an overlay plan was considered, but it seems that the split has been decided on. MARK_J._CUCCIA__PHONE/WRITE/WIRE/CABLE:__HOME:__(USA)__Tel:_CHestnut-1-2497 WORK:__mcuccia@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu|4710-Wright-Road|__(+1-504-241-2497) Tel:UNiversity-5-5954(+1-504-865-5954)|New-Orleans-28__|fwds-on-no-answr-to Fax:UNiversity-5-5917(+1-504-865-5917)|Louisiana(70128)|cellular/voicemail- ------------------------------ From: lwinson@bbs.cpcn.com (Lee Winson) Subject: Re: Let Local Competitors Build Their Own Local Loop Plant Date: 15 Dec 1997 23:52:52 GMT Organization: The PACSIBM SIG BBS > I would argue that the truly fair course of action would be to take > the local loop away from the RBOCs. Sure, AT&T and the RBOCs built it > up over a hundred years, but with whose money? The people of the > United State's money, that's who. Several people have stated this. I believe that point of view is flat out wrong, as well as unconstitutional. The local loop was built with the INVESTOR'S money, not the public. A phone system is worthless unless a critical mass of people are also customers, and there is switching equipment ready to take your call. The bills you pay are a return on the investment. Think about it: You order new phone service for the first time. In a couple of days, your service is turned on. Did they, in response to your request, build a central office and lay out a cable to your house -- AND -- bill you for all those expenses? No, of course not. Your monthly bill will pay over time for that layout. The amount of return on the stockholder's investment is regulated by law. If a plain private company offers a popular product, it can make a big profit. The phone company cannot. However, the phone company is still at risk for loss of investment. Suppose a community loses population (like many inner cities). The company is stuck with a bad investment in plant. Look at the railroads: the public decided to ride on government built highways and airports. The railroads were stuck with tracks and trains that weren't necessary, and some went bankrupt. If the government were to take over the local loop, the US Constitution requires that it pay for it. You cannot take private property without just compensation. > I hate the waste and inefficiency of government agencies as much as > anyone, but the government couldn't do a worse job of building the > phone system than the locals. Well then, you support my original post. Let some new company come along and do it their way and we'll see how it works ou t. > Perhaps if the government had taken control, we would have a decent > telephone 'backbone' and energetic, competitive companies offering > services using it. We'll never know. The rest of the world has government ownership, and the US always had the best phone system. Regarding the other post describing the arrogance of the "Ma Bell"... My own experiences with the old telephone company have been generally very good. Admittedly, I was served by the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, one of the best in the whole system. I've had dimes lost in pay phones, and they mailed me a refund. I also found a few dimes in pay phones, too. I wonder how many people mailed them to the phone company? As to challenging long distance calls, my own experience has been if you do it rarely, there was no problem. A friend told me his father found a strange call on their bill and gave the telco hell to take it off. They did. Turned out my friend made to call, he wasn't familiar with the town location shown. I suspect a lot of "stray" calls were the result of special one-time circumstances people merely forgot about. As far as Judge Greene: In Oslin's {The Story of Communications}, Oslin describes Greene has an activist judge out to make fresh public policy, in the spirit of the liberal 1960s. In other words, the implication was that the judge saw the phone company itself was inherently broken and needed fixing. Back in those days a lot of people DID feel that way -- that any large corporation was inherently evil simply by being a large corporation. ["Prejudice" takes many forms. You can have a very intelligent person convinced that all members of a certain ethnic group have a particular trait -- this is the common meaning. But a less known but just as virulent strain is thinking that all members of the _business_ community have a particular trait. That's no better.] When I started in computers in the early 1970s, there was a lot of criticism of IBM (which also was the target of an anti-trust suit but won it.) I asked my experienced co-workers if IBM was really as bad as the "conventional wisdom" had it. They replied: a) IBM got the flack because it was so large and visible and b) IBM's competitors did every undesirable business practice IBM did. (For myself, having used both IBM and competitors' computers, I found IBM products and support superior, and still do.) Back in those days it was very popular to spit on big corporate America, and AT&T got hit hard. Much of it was flat out unfair. As to the severe service problems of the 1970s, some of it was AT&T's fault for poor planning. Some of it was technical, in that their equipment wasn't suited for a high volume of installations. And some of it was social. At the time, people became much more mobile, moving around more often than ever. This resulted in a very high volume of change orders that the office and tech staff couldn't keep with. Technically, the old distributing frames filled up with jumpers faster than ever and this hindered connection efforts. Another problem at the time was high employee turnover, and the new employees couldn't be trained fast enough to know what they were doing. There were also complaints of the quality of workers the companies were pressured to hire at the time. Yet another problem of the times was vandalism and crime. Most broken pay phones were the result of vandalism and abuse, not poor maintenance. The phone company had to increase pay phone maintenance efforts at a time when its forces were stretched thin. If you have concentrated vandalism, you'll never catch up with it -- the minute a phone is fixed it'll get broken again. That is not the phone company's fault, but they got the blame. Please forgive my long-winded response. While some good social reforms came out of those days, a lot of bad things came out too, and I think people have to take a closer look at things. The changes in the telephone industry are a reflection of the changes of society, for better and worth. Sometimes the "conventional wisdom" is too broad and general and inaccurate. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This was indeed the hassle that New York Telephone, Illinois Bell and a couple other of the large metro-area telcos had in the 1970's. Pay phones were fair game for anyone who (a) wanted to vandalize something; or (b) use as a toilet as a way to show contempt for American business and the role they perceived it (a large corporation) played in the war in Viet Nam. We slid through the 1950's very easily, and *should* have seen what was coming after the rough-and-tumble 1960's but many large companies did not see it or chose to ignore it. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Michael Hayworth Subject: Re: Let Local Competitors Build Their Own Local Loop Plant Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 17:21:01 -0600 Organization: Innovative TeleSolutions Lee Winson wrote: > After reading the MCI sleaze post I had a thought: To be truly fair in > local telephone competition, let's make it TRUE competition. Let each > player build their own local loop plant and central office facilities. Yeah, and just so we make it really fair, let's make sure we guarantee each new competitor a huge customer base and give them a guaranteed profit. <> There's nothing difficult, impressive or particularly admirable about being willing to do all this stuff when you're guaranteed a profit for doing it. I'll be glad to sit in my corporate office and hire some poor guy to run cable to Uncle Fester's cave up in the Ozarks, if that's one of the requirements that comes with a huge guaranteed profit. > But the newcomers will have to meet the same standards that Bell > companies now meet to provide service. They'll have to wire ALL > neighborhoods and offer service to everyone, even high deadbeat slum > areas. Banks are forbidden to "redline" slum areas and must provide > branch offices in them, so there is precedent for this in competitive > industries. Banks are not *required* to build branch offices anywhere. They build branch offices where it makes them a profit. They *are* forbidden from redlining, which simply means that they can't automatically reject mortgage applications from people living in particular areas of a city. It doesn't mean they have to build an office there -- the folks who live there have to drive to them to a branch to apply for the mortgage. To stick with that analogy, if you want to require CLECs to accept customers in all areas of the city, that seems reasonable. Bell's former monopoly has already required them to run cable to those areas. But if they're not guaranteed a monolopoly, you can't require them to run cable to Uncle Fester instead of to my much-more-profitable door. We've paid for all this physical plant for years, due to the RBOC monopolies -- and a pretty poor plant it is, since there's been no motivation for them to run fiber instead of copper, or to build out facilities that can actually sustain a 56K modem call. Now, Bell is going to have to compete, and instead of going out and figuring out ways to actually make customers *want* to do business with them, they're going to whine and gripe and drag their feet all they can. The sad thing is that I find many times when I'm really impressed with how good a job SWBT does for me -- but those times are more than balanced out by the number of times that I can't believe what a poor job they do of providing either features or knowledgeable staff. Michael Hayworth VP, Technology Innovative TeleSolutions ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 07:14:21 -0800 From: Joseph Singer Subject: Re: Let Local Competitors Build Their Own Local Loop Plant recently wrote in TELECOM Digest: > Perhaps if the government had taken control [of the telephone > network], we would have a decent telephone 'backbone' and energetic, > competitive companies offering services using it. We'll never know. Evidently you don't know your telecom history fully as for a time the government *did* control the telephone network in the USA. If you look at most PTT's (or whatever they are called in a foreign country) you'll usually see an inefficient organization that gives absolutely abysmal service. Most were usually run by the post office system in that country. It's only been with the advent in these countries of making the companies public or at least not fully government owned that these countries developed decent telephone infrastructure. Some of the European countries France for example had some of the worst telecom plant imaginable. In some South American countries they had "dial tone" boys whose job it would be to wait on a telephone for a dial tone so that the businessman could complete a call things were so bad. I'll grant you competition has helped coax the incumbent telephone companies such as AT&T get their act together sooner, but the reality is that the Bell System in the US had a standard that was implemented throughout the Bell System and by and large that standard was followed with the effect being that you could count on telephone service to be reliable and there when you needed it. Yes, telephone service was very ordinary for years and you could count on no frills telephone service and not much more for many years, but everything hopefully changes and with that change we should be better off for it. Joseph Singer Seattle, Washington USA [ICQ pgr] PO Box 23135, Seattle WA 98102 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 20:53:33 -0500 From: Dave Stott Subject: Re: MCI Cancels Toll-Free Service in California In TELECOM Digest #346, Julia Fan wrote: > It does not sound like bait and switch to me. MCI offered a product > in good faith that did not take off, so they are discontinuing it. > More of a marketing decision than anything else. According to the > numbers from the article only 25,000 folks signed up ... out of how > many hundreds of thousands in the target market? It sounds like a > business decision that had to be made on a product that obviously was > not selling. And our Moderator replied, in part: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Generally -- but there is no firm rule; > no iron clad decision set in stone -- when a telco decides to stop > making some service available, they at least 'grandfather' the existing > customers ... And there's the rub. The telecom industry is like few others in that respect. When Post or Kellogg changes the price on the boxes of cereal they ship to the local grocery, the store manager has all the boxes on the shelf repriced, not just the new ones. When the price of gas goes up, all the gas goes up, even if the station doesn't expect a delivery for a few more days. Most perishable goods are like that -- when the price changes, it changes for all present and near-term future goods. We grew up in an industry that was heavily regulated and the 'grandfathering' of services was driven by the regulatory side of the business, not from the goodness of the telco's heart. The new entrants aren't regulated the same way the RBOCS and GTE are, and they can add and delete products as they see fit. That's the marketplace at work, and even if the incumbents can't play by the same rules _yet_, the rest of the industry can, and will. We've seen long distance plans come and go, and we've seen internet plans change from per-minute charges to "all you can eat" and now the direction is back to per-minute charges. Cellular and PCS phone companies are continually offering a variety of payment plans that come and go, and none of us, I suspect, expect any of them to last forever. Let's get used to the wireline companies trying new and different pricing structures. The reasonable pricing structures will prevail and when the companies try to buy marketshare, it is will remain a short term bargain for the customer. Dave Stott dstott@2help.com ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V17 #348 ******************************