Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id OAA28035; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 14:10:05 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 14:10:05 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199904281810.OAA28035@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #63 TELECOM Digest Wed, 28 Apr 99 14:09:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 63 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: "Internet Pioneers" (Bill Ranck) Re: "Internet Pioneers" (Matt Ackeret) Re: MTP Level 2 Error Correction Question (Thor Lancelot Simon) CPUC Files Waiver Requests With FCC For Numbering Relief (Linc Madison) Re: Portable Local Numbers: Why Aren't They? (Art Kamlet) Re: Portable Local Numbers: Why Aren't They? (John R. Levine) Re: The NANP Has 8+ Years to Go Says NANPA (John R. Levine) Re: Bizarre Cellular Cross-Talk (Arthur Ross) Re: Use of Cellular Phones in Schools (Matt Ackeret) Buy a Cable Modem and Go to Jail (TELECOM Digest Editor) 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 networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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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: Eric Ranck Subject: Re: "Internet Pioneers" Date: 27 Apr 1999 19:36:41 GMT Organization: Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA I saw things from the BITNET world though. I remember when ARPAnet/Internet had specific gateways into BITNET. You had to know the gateway and route mail to it with a bang address on the left side of the address. It was something like joeuser!somevax.arpa@gateway At the gateway the address would get stripped of the BITNET stuff and the bang got replaced with an '@' and then off it went. JANET, in the UK had bang separated addresses that were 'backward' to the ARPAnet addresses. You couldn't just hit 'reply' in those days. I worked in the User Services department at my university, and I had managed to acquire enough lore on how to address things for various gateways that e-mail questions frequently came to me. One day, shortly after lunch, a professor came in and said he wanted to correspond with a colleague in Isreal. I knew that BITNET was supposed to have a trans-Atlantic link hooked up "any day now," and the e-mail address he wanted to try was at one of the EARN (European version of BITNET) nodes so really there was no big trick. I showed him how to send e-mail, and said that I wasn't sure if the new link was up just yet, but I would send a test note just to show him how it worked. As we talked, the fellow in Isreal responded! Not only was the new link in place, but the fellow on the other end was logged in and answering. It is hard to describe how I felt. Sending that note and getting a response took less time than making a phone call would have. I was practically giddy. That was the point at which I realized what a fantastic tool networking could become. The whole potential just seemed so unbeleivably vast. I'd say it was a turning point for me, and I have lived through the following 15 or so years enjoying the ride and anxious to see how things turn out. ***************************************************************************** * Bill Ranck +1-540-231-3951 ranck@vt.edu * * Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Computing Center * ***************************************************************************** [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You forgot to mention what the letters in BITNET stood for: ecause t's ime ... I had about five or six hundred names on the Digest list at .bitnet sites and although I could have kept them all on the same master mailing list and let the stuff for .bitnet just go through the gateway, it turned out that the gateway was very sluggish and kept breaking down, which eventually the admins at the time detirmined was due to the size of my mailing list. So what they had me do was grep out all the .bitnet names on the list and make a separate list for them. Then they gave me an account on the gateway machine at Northwestern University to pump those out. It was called 'accuvax.bitnet' or 'accuvax.eecs.nwu.edu' depending on who was asking for it. Same machine .. it sat in the same room just a few feet from where my work station was, but that gateway would choke every time it got my load. So I had to put all the .bitnet names over there on accuvax, and a .forward file which pointed to a script that would start moving the mailing list over there. Then as an issue of the Digest would go out, one address on the main mailing list was actually just an 'exploder' which pointed at accuvax. So *one* copy only of the Digest went to accuvax which used it like a trigger to start the .bitnet list moving. That would have been in 1989 and 1990. It seems to me both Northwestern and MIT had things set up so that people sending email to BITNET just used the .bitnet suffix the way we do with .edu or .com now, and that told sendmail do not bother trying to parse anything here, just hand it to the gateway. When we sent mail to those tiny little private BBS's which were part of Fidonet the entire address line had to be of the form username!z1.f3.n2@name.of.gateway, meaning Fidonet Zone 1, net 3, node 2 I believe, and when it got that far it would look to the left of the bang and find out who was username on that local BBS. But mail coming back had to be different. The entire To: line was something like 'Internet:username!sitename@the.local.fido.hubsite' and if they wanted it to go to a Bitnet place they still had to say 'Internet' first as in "Internet:username!sitename!bitnet@whatever". But I will tell you one thing: we did not have any spam! :) Regards that 'giddy feeling', I saw someone with an Apple 2 computer, with 48K one day in 1978 or 79 and a 110 baud modem. He was having a terminal- to-terminal conversation with someone a few blocks away, and I watched him doing that and felt the same kind of emotions you describe. I never of course imagined myself ever doing anything like that, and then a year later more or less I was running a BBS on my own Apple ][+ and then a couple months later two BBSs at the same time, my own and the one we started as a volunteer thing for the Chicago Public Library. I always used Applesoft BASIC (Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) for my BBS programs and stuff. Really it was Microsoft BASIC but Apple had a license to use it in their machines under the name 'Applesoft'. For the library BBS I used Bill Blue's 'Peoples Message System' a popular software program at the time. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: 28 Apr 1999 01:41:31 -0000 From: Matt Ackeret Subject: Re: "Internet Pioneers" Organization: Area Systems in Mountain View, CA - http://www.area.com In article you write: > And remember the email to FTP gateways? Long before the web, when a > file transfer meant FTP'ing to a site -- if you could get through the Umm, a lot of the file downloading from web sites _is_ via ftp. I realize you are referring to using ftp directly, but ftp:// is one of the types of URL. mattack@area.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think I heard that mentioned once before Matt. In fact, I think the guy who set up the Telecom Archives web site fixed things so you could go to an archives file, right-click and download the file to your computer. Just imagine: years and years of Editor's Notes available with a mere right-click on the requested file. Makes you sort of nauseous, doesn't it. PAT] ------------------------------ From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) Subject: Re: MTP Level 2 Error Correction Question Date: 27 Apr 1999 20:10:58 -0400 Organization: PANIX -- Public Access Networks Corp. Reply-To: tls@rek.tjls.com In article , Kyung Jun, Cho wrote: > There are two Error Correction Method Basic and PCR(Preventive Cyclic > retransmission) in ITU-T Q703. > We use the basic error correction method in domestic area, and I know > most international carrier use PCR method in Internationa SS7 span. Actually, the PCR (or "aggressive") mode, where data is constantly retransmitted until it's acknowledged, is usually used only on links with high latency, such as satellite links. AFAIK it's not commonly used on undersea cables (but then again, I'm hardly an expert on international SS7, so I could be wrong). > I would like to know if there is any problem when we interconnect > between national exchange(BASIC error correction method) and > International exchange(PCR method) via ss7 signaling link. So long as your software is conformant to the protocol specs, I think it will just work. All PCR "error correction" does is mindlessly retransmit already-sent packets until they're acknowledged by the other end. This is perfectly legal to do on any MTP link, so long as the forward and backward sequence numbers and indicator ("parity") bits are handled correctly. I suppose it's concievable that on a link with Really High latency (multiple satellite hops?) using "basic" mode you might get into a condition where you couldn't actually recover from an error, because the sequence number had wrapped around, but you're talking about latencies on the order of a second, assuming MSU sizes of 60 octets or so. If you're implementing the software, you should probably just write the code to do PCR mode; it's very simple. If you aren't, and your vendor doesn't support it, you should make them do so -- again, it's very easy. If you're hoping to just run signaling links from an exchange or STP speaking a national variant of SS7 to the far end of some international carrier's undersea or satellite network, I think you're going to have worse problems -- you really need exchanges and STPs in international gateway configurations to handle the necessary interworking, SS7 is *far* from the same in international and most national variants. Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com "And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?" ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 18:37:59 -0700 From: Telecom@LincMad.com.NOSPAM (Linc Madison) Subject: CPUC Files Waiver Requests With FCC For Numbering Relief Organization: LincMad Consulting The California Public Utilities Commission issued a press release: Contact: Armando Rendn, 415-703-1366 April 26, 1999 CPUC-018 CPUC Asks FCC For Waiver On Number Allocations To Help Check Area Code Proliferation The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to waive key federal rules that would provide the CPUC with the additional tools it needs to try to bring under control the "number crisis" facing the state. The waivers, if granted, would enable the CPUC to oversee the allocation of phone numbers to companies more efficiently and to consider assigning area codes to specific technologies, such as pagers, fax machines, and modems. In just the past three years, the number of area codes has doubled in California. CPUC President Richard A. Bilas was meeting in Washington, D.C., today with FCC Commissioners and staff in a personal effort to obtain for the state more flexibility in allocating phone numbers. In two companion filings, the CPUC asked for the following actions: A waiver of 47 C.F.R. 52.19 (c)(3) which prohibits the assignment of an area code to a specific technology or service The grant to the CPUC of additional authority to: 1. implement a mandatory number pooling trial 2. order efficient number use practices within existing prefixes 3. handle requests for code assignments outside the present rationing process 4. order carriers to return to the Code Administrator unused prefixes 5. order carriers to return unused or under-utilized portions of prefixes to the pooling administrator, when one is selected. California will open its 26th area code later this year. To meet the demand for numbers, without implementing any conservation measures, will require 15 more area codes by the end of 2002, bringing the total number of area codes in this state to 41. California has 190 competitive local phone companies and 56 wireless firms, all of which need to assign numbers to their customers. Numbers are assigned in blocks of 10,000 per rate center; there are 800 rate centers in the state. According to the way phone numbers are now allocated, a carrier seeking to provide service statewide in California would need 8,000,000 numbers to begin offering service. The petitions seek FCC authority without which the Commission cannot act. Once granted, the CPUC would investigate and determine the worth of any conservation methods, before ordering action. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- LincMad Commentary: The CPUC was very disappointed that both Pacific Bell and GTE declined to participate in a voluntary trial of number pooling, and current FCC regulations do not allow the CPUC to make the trial mandatory. The timing of this request, right on the heels of the NANPA report on the impending exhaust of the entire 10-digit numbering system for North America, is excellent. If every one of the CLECs had just one prefix in each rate center, that would give California over 200 area codes, before you even count the numbers assigned to Pacific Bell, GTE, and the various wireless carriers. Clearly such a situation is unacceptable. Even with thousands-block pooling, the CLECs would require 20 area codes. The bottom line is that only full pooling of *ALL* unused numbers in each rate center, plus some reasonable consolidation of rate centers, perhaps with an expansion of the local calling zone beyond its current 12-mile radius. ** 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 delete the "NOSPAM" << ------------------------------ From: kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet) Subject: Re: Portable Local Numbers: Why Aren't They? Date: 27 Apr 1999 17:43:09 -0400 Organization: InfiNet Reply-To: kamlet@infinet.com In article , Gideon Stocek wrote: > Can someone provide a good reference for changes required to ISUP > and/or TCAP application requirements for LNP? I'm curious as to how > this is all supposed to work. You are posting from a Lucent addrress yet ask about LNP? My advice is to check with the lucent LNP standards folks. Try the ActiView folks in Holdmel, for example, for an LNP person. Basically there will be a few additional applications transactions which will have to query the LNP SCPs or SCP-databases (the SCP can manage the SS7 queries to SCDs which act just like databases.) There are proposed standards which have local routing numbers and dialed numbers turned around in transit, and without a picture in front of me, I hesitate to try to describe these. Your use of TCAP does reflect a certain, um, bias, right? Those are the proprietary defined application messages, am I right? But are not restricted to SS7 by any means. As to why it tales so long to implement LNP? First, because they allowed Interimim LNP to be put in, and now it seems there might be heel dragging to move to real LNP, and second, because those SCPs cost big bucks. The Ameritech charge for LNP is collecting money to eventually buy SCPs. If Ameritech placed high priority to do LNP it wouldn't put this as a charge on costomer's bills. It doesn't put the costs of services it wants to offer on bills, only those it is pushed into. When was the last time you saw a phone company list a charge for, say, repeat dialing when busy, on your bill unless you used it? They added the software and hardware for it, but never showed it on the bills because they want to do that. Art Kamlet Columbus, Ohio kamlet@infinet.com ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine) Subject: Re: Portable Local Numbers: Why Aren't They? Date: 27 Apr 1999 22:56:53 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > As I understand it the FCC has not yet allowed porting outside the > original exchange until they see how many problems are generated. I was under the impression that the sticking point was who would pay for the call. Even if the old and new exchanges are local to each other, distance-rated long distance calls might charge different amounts to the two exchanges. (Inter-lata is almost all flat rate, but intra-lata is still often distance sensitive.) John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine) Subject: Re: The NANP Has 8+ Years to Go Says NANPA Date: 27 Apr 1999 23:04:25 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Nothing personal against the US, but I think that Canada should also > be split off into its own country code. I suspect that many Canadians wouldn't like that idea. Having a common dialing plan with the US is very helpful to the large number of Canadians and Canadian businesses with strong ties to the US. I suppose it's an advantage to US residents and businesses with ties to Canada, but I still get the impression that most Americans have only the vaguest idea where Canada is and, if they think of Canada at all, think that Toronto is built on a glacier. > [ re breaking 809 into separate NPAs ] > Excellent idea. What is the rationale behind separate area codes for > a bunch of overgrown sandbars, many of which barely justify a whole > exchange, let alone an area code? Now, now, they all have at least two prefixes. But there's a simple reason: routing and billing. The CCITT says that you have to be able to route and price an international call on the first six digits. In the US and Canada, it's easy, you can tell from the first four, 1-NPA, which country it is. For a long time there were few enough Caribbean prefixes that they could assign them so that in 1-809-NNX, all of NN0 through NN9 were in the same country, so you could tell from the first 6 where it was. They started needing enough prefixes so they couldn't do that any more, so each country or territory got its own NPA. As someone else noted, Canada and the Caribbean togehter are only 10% of the total NPAs, so recovering them for the US wouldn't stave off number exhaustion very long. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 21:39:27 -0700 From: Arthur Ross Subject: Bizarre Cellular Cross-Talk Telecom@LincMad.com.NOSPAM (Linc Madison) wrote: > I was talking on my landline POTS phone today, to a friend who was > calling from some variety of cellphone or PCS phone. Suddenly, as > clear as day, I heard someone else's conversation, something along > the lines of "Dad, can you hear me now?" I hadn't realized that my > friend was on a wireless phone, so I thought perhaps someone was > monkeying with the demarc on one end or the other. The cut-in was > only for about 20 or 30 seconds, before the other party/parties > went away. This sort of thing actually occurs fairly often in analog cellular systems. It is almost undoubtedly a color code failure. Analog cellular has a bit over 400 channels (frequencies) available to each operator in a market. The transmission is analog FM, with the channels apportioned to the cells in such a way as to try to maximize the distance between re-uses of the same frequency. The unfortunate reality, however, is that occasionally some undesired, remote station may, for a short time, be stronger than the correct station due to the vagaries of electromagnetic propagation in the land mobile environment. The old AMPS standard tries to cope with this through the use of the so-called Supervisory Auditory Tones. These are tones, added to the downlink, around 6000 Hz. They are filtered out of what is delivered to the customer's ear, but the phone compares the received tone to the tone that is being transmitted by the right station, which is made known as part of the call setup and handoff messaging. There are only three possible tones available. A few seconds thought shows that, assuming the interfering signals are randomly selected from a large population of inappropriate cells using the same channel (one in 21, typically), that there is a one in three chance of the color code test passing, even though the wrong cell is being received. Ergo, the kind of "crosstalk" observed. This kind of thing occurs fairly often in analog systems, and, IMHO, is a design deficiency of the old standard. It probably made sense when the expected user population was small, but it is clearly inadequate now. The new digital systems do a FAR better job of this. While there is still some probability of hearing an inappropriate station, the probability of the equivalent subscriber-unique digital "cover" failing is something like one in 2^42 (about one in four trillion) rather than one in three, besides the need for the spreading code phase to match, which is something like one in 512 on top of the digital cover. Big improvement. This sort of accidental cross-connect doesn't happen, as a practical matter. Best regards, Dr. Arthur Ross 2325 East Orangewood Avenue Phoenix, AZ 85020-4730 Phone: 602-371-9708 Fax : 602-336-7074 ------------------------------ Date: 28 Apr 1999 01:36:48 -0000 From: Matt Ackeret Subject: Re: Use of Cellular Phones in Schools Organization: Area Systems in Mountain View, CA - http://www.area.com In article TELECOM Digest Editor noted: > NO, we do not need any more gun laws; NO we do not need any knee-jerk If they did not have access to guns, it would have been much more difficult to kill so many people. mattack@area.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That's the same thing which was said at the time of the last mass killing spree. There have been so many of them I cannot remember the exact order in which they occurred. And after the last mass killing spree, and the one one before that and the one before that, new laws were enacted about guns. Each new law prevented more killings, didn't it? Either you use a weapon in a re- sponsible way, or you do not use one in a responsible way. If, as 'they' say, the only purpose of a gun is to kill someone, then we should not allow police officers to carry one either, but we know that in fact the mere display of a gun in a responsible way helps to maintain some modicum of civilization. We obey the laws in this country if for no other reason than our understanding that in the background somewhere, there is always that gun which can be used to force us to obey. Perhaps we obey because we want to, or maybe it is very inconvenient not to obey, but if it comes to that point, a gun is back there somewhere which can and will be used. You are asking about my personal possession of such a thing? Guns frighten me to death. I would never allow a gun in my home, however humble my home. I could not bring myself to touch one or pick it up; I'd rather you just kill me than force me to kill you. Looking at one makes me emotionally upset when I think about the ways in which guns have been abused. Would I ever want to take away your freedom to use a gun in a *responsible* way? Never. You run your house and life as you please; I will run my house and life as I please. You mind your business and I will attend to mine. Guns have no part in my life, or home or business. Let them be part of yours if you wish. I have no ethical or moral right to restrict you. We have enough gun laws to go around six times over. None of them have worked. More laws now are futile. Anyway, in Colorado their plan was to kill 'at least 500 people', in large part with the explosives (other than gun powder!) they carried in. They 'only' wound up killing a dozen or two. Whose fault was that, that the results fell far short of their stated goal? Maybe you saw the little blurb yesterday in the 'slashdot' report: a ten year old boy wrote in to say, "I came home from school today and found that my parents had gotten rid of my computer. They said they could not be certain about the kinds of things I would see on the Internet. I am at a friend's house writing this email to you. Please try and help my parents understand the Internet is not at fault for what happened ...". Well kid, neither are guns. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 00:35:51 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Buy a Cable Modem and Go to Jail On Tuesday evening I sent out a special mailing to the list with the fascinating account by Judy Sammel of her experience with Comcast, a cable television company and one of their subsidiaries called comcast@home. It tells of the ineptitude of the company, the very awful humiliation she endured as a result, and the way she was shoved around from one person to another at the company before any kind of results could be obtained. Everyone should have a copy by now, and if you have not read it, I hope you will take a few minutes today to do so. It is also posted as a special feature at http://telecom-digest.org PAT ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #63 *****************************