Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id BAA16281; Sun, 2 May 1999 01:56:19 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 2 May 1999 01:56:19 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199905020556.BAA16281@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #68 TELECOM Digest Sun, 2 May 99 01:56:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 68 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Forcing MCI to Change Advertising (TELECOM Digest Editor) Final CFP: MONET Issue on Energy-Conserving Protocols for Wireless (J Redi) Re: Lawsuit Says MCI 'Redlines' (Ed Leslie) Re: NANP Running Out of Numbers in 8+ Years (Louis Raphael) Re: Imminent Exhaustion of the NANP Should be a Wake-up Call! (Dave Stott) Comcast @home (Jim Willis) Re: Card Reader Type Public Phones (Louis Raphael) Legislation Passed to Tranform Satellite TV (Ed Ellers) Cordless Phone Help Wanted (dlore@iname.com) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 1 May 1999 23:09:15 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Forcing MCI to Change Advertising Someone asked me to repeat this, so here it is. I originally wrote about this in {Telephony Magazine}, the journal which was very popular among telco employees until at least sometime in the early eighties. I do not hear much about them these days. Anyway, MCI, which means (M)icrowave (C)ommunications, (I)nc. first went business in the 1960's, under a different name. It was a small, storefront operation in Joliet, IL in the business of selling and repairing microwave communications gear. Then Bill McGowan got into the business, and partnered with the fellow who owned the little shop in Joliet, and the whole nature of their business changed in the next few years. A lot of you already know that part of their history. Their first venture in handling actual traffic came in 1968 when they petitioned the Illinois Commerce Commission for permission to operate a microwave circuit between Chicago and St. Louis, for, as they said at the time, a 'limited number of customers in a special class'. As to be expected, Illinois Bell fought the petition and tried to keep them from operating the circuit, but MCI prevailed in the proceedings before the Illinois Commerce Commission, and was allowed to open the service. Some have suggested that first petition they filed asking to operate a communications network was fraudulent in the way it misrepresented their planned or perceived customer base. That is a story for another time. None the less, MCI as a telecommunications carrier of long distance traffic was now in business. Remember, this was before any of the rules about equal access had been started; there were no such things as PIC codes. Ma Bell, also known as AT&T ruled with an iron fist. Over the next few years, MCI was able to expand its territory to include not only Chicago to St. Louis, but Chicago to New York, Chicago to Los Angeles, etc. By the middle 1970's MCI was serving about a dozen major cities through a service called 'Execunet', a phone service for 'executives'. In order to access their network, one used any telephone and dialed the local seven digit number designated. For example, in Chicago, the number 312-871-0001 resulted in the caller hearing a new dial tone from the MCI switch, against which he would dial his account code, and the desired ten digit number, assuming it was in one of the cities that MCI served. MCI then went to the city in question, took a regular line in that place, and out-dialed the seven digits desired. They did no checking of any sort regards the number dialed; in other words if the caller in Chicago dialed into the MCI switch, entered his access code and then dialed something like 212-911, when the call jumped off of MCI's network in New York, a local line there literally dialled 911. We tested it a few times back then with things like 411 for directory, as well as 950 and 976 numbers, which carried premium charges. You could even do something like 212-1-312-876-0001 and get the outgoing line in New York to make a call back to Chicago, whereupon you would once again hear the MCI dial tone. I think once we had a loop like that up about six or seven times around before the transmission got so bad we gave it up. Basically then, 212 just said 'get a line in New York and dial the number given'; 415 meant 'get a line in San Francisco and dial the number given' ... ... you could even dial 900 numbers against the other end (grin) to psychic hotlines or whatever, dialing 212-1-900-whatever. The early days were all very crude and unsophisticated. Finally one day, an attempt to call a premium charge number returned a recording from the switch in Chicago saying, 'at the present time, MCI does not complete calls to 976 numbers ... 'Gradually MCI closed in on the bugs in their system, and became much more sophisticated. By the middle 1980's when they had equal access and were serving every single town in the USA, they had closed most all of the loopholes from earlier years. MCI rates between those limited points -- all major cities -- which they served in the 1970's were about 80 percent of what AT&T was charging, and MCI was fond of pointing that out in their advertising. In those days they generally directed all their efforts to only very large or medium sized companies. Their advertisements would say that their rates were *automatically* 20 percent less than what AT&T charged; would you rather pay their price or pay ours? And when their sales reps would pay visits to large companies to try and sell them on their service, if the telecom guy at the company said they would rather stick with AT&T, the MCI sales rep's attitude and demeanor would become very quizzical: 'but why would you want to pay 20 percent more?' And still another company would move over to MCI. What they were NOT telling people was that the obligatory call to their seven digit local access number was *supervised*, meaning charged, by Illinois Bell. And while MCI did not charge you if the distant end was busy or did not answer (they had no supervisory techniques so in fact they did not charge for any connection less than thirty seconds and for all connections greater than thirty seconds, ring/no answer, busy, whatever). So if you had to make five calls to get through to a number somewhere, yes, MCI charged you only once (assuming you hung up within thirty seconds of hearing the busy signal) **but you still got charged a message unit from IBT each time around**. The difference, as we all know, was that in those days, the local telco gave you the essence of a 'free ride' to the toll switch in your town, or wherever it was. MCI got no such free ride for their customers to their switch. While it would have been true in small communities where the local telco gives unmeasured local service that there would be that twenty percent savings using MCI, in larger places -- and that is all that MCI served in its early days -- where local calls were billed as 'message units' or similar, at maybe five cents each, much if not all of the 'savings by using MCI' were eaten up by additional local message charges from Illinois Bell. And there were many cases in which the bottom line was *more* than it would have been with AT&T since MCI had many large customers in distant suburbs from Chicago who had to pay 2,3 or even 4 message units to Bell everytime they called the MCI switch! A month or two into their 'saving twenty percent using MCI' experience, many corporate telecom managers would review the phone bill and see a definite decrease in long distance charges from AT&T, and it was MCI's hope they would *not* see the humongous increase in 'message units' for local calls. And frankly, most of them did not see it. A large corporation might go through a million or more 'local message units' every month, and then one month it is a hundred thousand more local message units than usual. If they happened to be talking to the MCI sales rep, he would say, 'well it must be that your employees are making a lot more personal calls', and many is the telecom manager who bought that line and sent out a memo to all employees telling them to stay off the phone with personal calls and use the payphone in the lunchroom instead for that purpose. But then next month, the bill would be just as high on local calls, or maybe higher, as obedient employees would remember to make their long distance calls by dialing 876-0001 then the area code and number, just as they had been told to do. Line is busy? Hang up and immediatly redial; do it again, and again. In those days, MCI structured their advertising on the theory that very few people if any knew exactly what they were paying 'the phone company' for anyway, and if you told them a way to 'get one over on Ma Bell' (not using those words of course) a lot of people would be glad to use 'this new way to save money on phone calls'. MCI's good luck came in the fact that most people would only look at their total bill and those portions (like long distance calls) which were specif- ically coin-rated instead of a bunch of message units lumped together. So they could rightfully point out that if you looked at AT&T's portion of your bill 'from the phone company' and then compared it with the bill that MCI sent you in the mail each month, you would see that what they said was true; you were paying less to MCI than you would have paid for the same thing to AT&T. At the time, the chairman of AT&T was a fellow named Charles Brown. Mr. Brown had formerly been the president of Illinois Bell, and when he had been president of IBT he was a neighbor of mine in Rogers Park, a neighborhood in Chicago. I wrote him a note and said why don't you people, umm, clarify things just a bit? AT&T was getting increasingly annoyed by MCI's advertising tactics ('when you can pay us twenty percent less, why would you want to pay them a hundred percent') and a press release came out from Mr. Brown saying in effect that they could run a cut-rate, wholesale long distance business also if 'all we did was skim the cream from the highly profitable east coast corridor and the major cities. If AT&T did not bother to serve every tiny rural community all over the USA, taking a loss on many of them which was subsidized by long distance, I suspect we could undercut MCI and sell ours for fifty percent of what it is now.' And the press release continued, 'When is the last time MCI went out to fix someone's phone when it was broken? When is the last time a couple of their employees were out in the mountains of Wyoming on a January day in a temperature of five below zero for the sole purpose of restoring service to a community of thirty people when a blizzard knocked their community telephone cable down from a pole and put them out of service? Five below zero, winds about thirty miles an hour, and several inches of snow and ice on the side of a mountain. One employee slipped and fell to his death; his partner/co-worker went to his rescue and wound up severely injured in the process. I guess that is why they can give cut rate prices on long distance calls and I cannot.' A couple months later, MCI instituted a new charge, called 'call termin- ation fee', and this, they said, was what telco was charging them for those phone lines in the places where calls went. So now the telephone consumer was paying (1) MCI for the call, (2) MCI for the distant termination charge and (3) Illinois Bell for the requisite message units to get on MCI's switch in the first place. Yet they still continued with their claim of 'twenty percent less, why would you want to pay them a hundred percent?' I began noticing that from about 1 AM each night until roughly 3 AM the MCI access number would not answer at all. When I asked them why it was impossible to 'save twenty percent on my calls' between 1 and 3 AM when they apparently took no business, they said to me they had to have time to 'do the billing'; that they needed to 'shut down the computer in order to run the billing tapes' ... and my response was, that seems rather odd, I wonder how AT&T manages to run their billing tapes, staying up 24 hours per day as they do. They also begin advertising deliberatly telling people that, when you need directory assistance, dial the area code and 555-1212, it is a free call; once you get the number then hang up and place the call via our switch. Employees at companies were told that when they had to call 555-1212 they were NOT to place that call via MCI (for which they would be billed at the rate for other calls to that community) but instead to place the call via AT&T; then to place the actual call itself via MCI in the earlier requested way. ** That, friends, is the main reason areacode-555-1212 is no longer a free call, and has not been for many years. AT&T gave totally free directory service everywhere, but of course you placed the call with them 'at rates that are twenty percent higher'. ** I filed a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission asking that MCI be forced to reveal the true cost of phone calls in their advertising, and that they either be forced to remain on line 24 hours per day or include in their advertising that their service was not available during certain overnight hours. The end result was that the FCC ordered them to include in their advertising a statement saying, "additional charges may be imposed by your local telephone company to access our service, and these additional charges may in fact offset the savings described above." They had to include that in their advertising in cities like Chicago or anywhere the local telco used 'message units' to bill for local calls. Of course that was long before the days of equal access; long before PIC codes and one plus dialing defaults. But I always did feel that MCI from its earliest days onward was less than totally honest with the public; that their stock in trade was using the ignorance of the general public about how telephones work as a way to rip off, or 'skim the cream' as it was called, the profits in the long distance business. I hope if you did not previously know that MCI got its start in a small storefront in Joliet, Illinois in the middle 1960's as a radio sales and repair business that you found that part of my article interesting at least. How SPRINT (S)outhern (P)acific (R)ailroad (I)nternal (N)etwork (T)elecom got its start is an interesting story also for another time. It literally consisted of three or four people who maintained the telecom department of the railroad back in the late 1960's, and a modernization of the phone network which left a lot of excess capacity the railroad decided to sell to other large businesses. Sprint got started about three or four years after MCI was established. I talked once to an MCI attorney; it might have been about 1975 and said something about 'sleaze' ... and I remember his response well. He said, "Ha! listen to this 'shill for AT&T' talk about how sleazy our company is! Are you trying to say that back in 1903 or thereabouts AT&T was going around with clean hands that they washed in Holy Water?" No, I was not ... sadly, they all have a history that is less than honorable in their early days. That's it from me for today! PAT ------------------------------ From: Jason Redi Subject: Final CFP: MONET Issue on Energy-Conserving Protocols for Wireless Organization: BBN Technologies Date: Sat, 01 May 1999 20:42:24 GMT ************************* CALL FOR PAPERS ************************* Baltzer Science Publishers in cooperation with ACM announce a Special Issue of the Journal on Special Topics in Mobile Networking and Applications (MONET) on ENERGY-CONSERVING PROTOCOLS IN WIRELESS NETWORKS With Guest Editors: Dr. Chiara Petrioli Politecnico di Milano Chiara.Petrioli@elet.polimi.it Prof. Ramesh Rao University of California, San Diego rrao@ucsd.edu Dr. Jason Redi BBN Technologies redi@bbn.com OVERVIEW: The most important factors which will determine the success of wireless mobile communications are the utility and convenience of the end user devices. Paramount to both of these areas is the amount of energy that is required by the mobile devices. As most current battery research does not predict a substantial change in the available energy in a consumer battery, it is important that wireless devices be designed for energy-constraint. There has been substantial research in the hardware aspects of mobile communications energy-efficiency, such as low power electronics, processor sleep-time, and energy-efficient modulation. However, due to fundamental physical limitations, progress towards further energy-efficiency will become mostly a software-level issue. Recent work has shown that substantial reductions in the energy used by a mobile communications protocol are achievable without dramatically affecting its performance. Legacy communications protocols, quality of service, overhead and protocol complexity are just a few areas that are beginning to be re-evaluated in the context of energy-usage. SCOPE: This special issue will concentrate on software, protocols and algorithms at the MAC-layer and above which are designed to reduce the amount of energy used by the wireless transceiver. We encourage approaches which are physical-layer independent. The following topics are examples of areas which may be considered: - energy-conserving access protocols - ARQ variants for the reduction of energy - effects of energy-conservation on the higher-level protocols - APIs for evaluating energy requirements in applications - scheduling and resource reservation which include energy as a primary constraint - QoS guarantees for energy-conservation - energy-conserving routing techniques - re-evaluation of classical techniques under energy constraints - characterization and modeling of energy-saving methods PUBLICATION SCHEDULE: Manuscript Due: May 30, 1999 Acceptance Notification: August 30, 1999 Final Manuscript Due: October 30, 1999 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Authors should email an electronic Postscript copy of their paper to redi@bbn.com by May 30, 1999. Submissions should be limited to 20 double space pages excluding figures, graphs and illustrations. If email submission is impossible then six (6) copies of the paper (double-sided if possible) should be sent by the due date to: Dr. Jason Redi Mobile Network Systems Group BBN Technologies M/S 6/2a, 10 Moulton St. Cambridge, MA, 02138 redi@bbn.com ------------------------------ From: EdLeslie@EDU.YorkU.CA (Ed Leslie) Subject: Re: Lawsuit Says MCI 'Redlines' Date: Sat, 01 May 1999 05:57:29 GMT Organization: @Home Network Canada On Fri, 30 Apr 1999 09:52:16 +0200, Patrick Burke wrote: > L. Winson schrieb in im Newsbeitrag: > telecom19.57.5@telecom-digest.org... >>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Does anyone know why card reader type >>> phones never really caught on? [good points snipped] >> Damn good question. I myself would rather have the security of >> inserting a card and entering just my pin number rather than entering >> (and remembering) a whole series of numbers. ><...snip...> > In Switzerland and Holland, at least, card phones are standard. In > fact, it's sometimes impossible to find a coin phone. Cards can be > purchased at many locations and I've never had a problem finding > one. Here in Bell Canada territory, we are "well served". :-) Properly done, benevolent dictatorship *can* be a "Good Thing". :-)) All of a sudden, a "few" years ago, *every* payphone was replaced with the new "Millenium Phone" model, which includes a card reader which not only will read/accept prepaid "phonecards", but which will also accept the "generally more expensive (i.e. *very* more expensive)" credit cards. While this was probably oveall a "good thing", I have to try to ignore the fact that it probably was all done under the auspices of the "Canadian Regulated TeleCommunications regulated system" (i.e. there was a horrrendous capital cost in replacing each and every payphone in Ontario and Quebec, which simply became part of the "sanctioned" part of the costs of providing telephone services in the government-regulated area). I now carry a pre-paid phone-card, as do my children, for use in payphones -- and the payphones actually were software upgraded to "beep" at you if you did not remove your card after use -- I gather the major frustration was that a user would forget to remove their card after making a call (they obviously are not as "Scottish" as am I). :-)) EdLeslie@TorFree.NET ------------------------------ From: Louis Raphael Subject: Re: NANP Running Out of Numbers in 8+ Years Organization: Societe pour la promotion du petoncle vert Date: Sat, 01 May 1999 21:19:04 GMT Tom Lager wrote and PAT commented: > Divide the present country code 1 into two parts, or perhaps three > parts if Canada is to be included, known as 12, 13, and 14. Anyone > calling within their own 'country code' would continue to dial seven, > ten or eleven digits as they do now. To call the other side of the > USA, 'international' dialing procedures would be used, as we do now > with '011'. 011 would continue to be 'international, anywhere else' > while 012 was one part of the USA, 013 was another. People in other > countries calling here would instead dialing country code 1 start > dialing country code 12, 13, etc, plus the ten digit number. I'm not sure how the ITU would react to the idea of adding another country code, but with your scheme, I suppose that it wouldn't even be necessary to involve them, as all would still be under +1. Canada and those parts of the Caribbean in the NANP could also split off, which would probably relax the problem for many years more. On this side (Canada), it would also make it possible to continue the old-style conventions about area codes and prefixes, and to keep situations like Ottawa-Hull 7-digit dialing (still in use, I think), even though the two are in different area codes. If this were to be done, however, something would have to be done about cross-border 1-800 numbers. Also, I suspect that it might not be very good for Canadian businesses that deal a lot in the US, as many Americans would probably be "confused" by having to dial an obviously international call. Maybe it would be possible to set aside one or two area codes in each of the countries for businesses that want "national" phone numbers. Of course, that would just be starting another problem :-(. Louis [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: 800 numbers would continue to be sorted as they are now. Either they would go one place or they would to another place. The only people who would have to worry about it are the carriers who assign them in the first place. For some percentage of their existing database they would need to make changes over a period of a couple years. Maybe 800-xxx-xxxx which now really goes to 415-xxx-xxxx would have to be set to go to 012-415-xxx-xxxx. Regards the ITU, we would still basically be one code, namely '1'; I guess it could be explained in other countries saying that when calling the USA, you still dial '1' but then for the eastern side you dial a '2' plus the number, and for the western side you dial '3' and the number. That would give us all the way up to '19' for still more divisions, etc as years went along. I think the reason my plan is more workable is because it does not involve trying to make all the switches deal with 8 digits. Most calls would still be 7 digits; we are just changing our definition of what constitutes an 'international call', something the switches are able to deal with now easily anyway. Regards the business people who would be annoyed with the 'international call' aspect of the whole thing, I remember when my grandmother many, many years ago was so disgusted with the conversion from manual service to dial as, she claimed, were all the 'old people', because their eye- sight was not that good and they had to squint to see the dial. Somehow we survived, as the world rushes on. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 01 May 1999 07:12:16 -0700 From: Dave Stott Subject: Re: Imminent Exhaustion of the NANP Should be a Wake-up Call! Our esteemed moderator wrote: >[Moderator's Note: Sorry to disappoint you, but your son is >wrong. UCLA did not invent the internet ... *I* did. Sure you did Pat! We all know Al Gore invented the Internet -- he told us so (and politicians in the Clinton Administration aren't allowed to lie because it's the most ethical administration in history!). Next you'll probably be telling us that dropping bombs on a country and blockading harbors in Europe is no different than doing the same thing in SE Asia and it's not _really_ war and so on, and so on, and so on. Phone: (480) 831-7355 Fax: (480) 831-1176 Free: (888) 43-2HELP [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yep, that's what I am telling you about the European 'police action' going on and its similarities to the 'police action' in Vietnam which *finally* ended twenty-some years ago, after going on for a dozen years. Remember the day back in the middle seventies sometime when the newspapers glumly announced that, 'until yesterday, the longest lasting war involving the United States was the Revolutionary War, which went on for eleven plus years .. as of yesterday, the war in Vietnam became the longest lasting war, and there are no signs right now that it will end any time soon ... ' Of course we had no internet back then and quick communication among people was very difficult. Regretably (in one sense) Vietnam was 'so long ago' that about half of our population in the USA was either not yet born or too young to now remember much about it. Unless you are at least in your late thirties or older, you have no real idea of the horrors *in this country* as a result; the almost daily protest demonstrations by huge numbers of people, the riots, the endless propoganda from both sides and all directions, etc. I was interviewed on National Public Radio one night in 1968 when we were having the worst of the riots -- that year! -- in Chicago. The National Guard was out in force, throwing tear gas bombs at people who were throwing rotten eggs at them, etc. There were three of those great big military conveyences, the things that run on tread- mills like a tractor, with a large cannon on the front and a place for soldiers to hide inside -- what do you call them? -- in the parking lot of the Museum of Science and Industry, about a half block from where I lived. And everywhere you went, one or two National Guardsmen standing on the corner. I went downtown one day with my roomate; we were standing on the platform waiting for the commuter train to arrive. A National Guard guy was standing a bit away down the platform. I just glared at the guy ... my roomate said 'what are you thinking about?' I said, 'I am thinking that what I would like to do is when the train starts pulling in, walk down there and shove him off the platform right in front of it.' Of course I did no such thing and my roomate counseled me, don't have ugly thoughts ... but that was the nature of Vietnam; before it was over, everyone was having ugly thoughts all day and bad dreams all night. If the office building you worked in or the school you went to was not evacuated at least once a week because someone pulled the fire alarm switch or there had been a telephone bomb threat, you were lucky. If you were able to go a month at a time without walking down the street and finding yourself in the middle of a group of war protestors who were getting clubbed on the head by police with tear gas cannisters going off all around you then you were fortunate. If by 1972 or so you did not know personally at least one or two guys who were killed in Vietnam, you were extremely lucky. And if you wanted to check your luck that day, you could always call a phone number in Washington DC where the cheerful public servant answered the phone 'Vietnam Death Registry' and would put you on hold while she checked the lastest paperwork. This is too depressing to write about. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Jim Willis Subject: Comcast @home Date: Sat, 1 May 1999 19:48:13 -0400 I guess that is why the cable folks SHAW, in Barrie place a condition on you subscribing to their service called guess what Shaw@home. In the fine print in their advertisements - you must subscribe to basic cable. More money for them and no problems like this ... No we don't have cable, we use satellite for our TV pay for 12 months get one month free - fixed price for 12 months, no increases or negative numbers on next year's bill. Cable seems to be the only service I know that if you pay for a year you don't get a year. jwillis@drlogick.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Their making you sign up for basic cable has nothing to do with helping them to keep their records straight; it has to do with greed. Someone said I should quit picking on Comcast; after all, there are lots of other cable companies out there doing (to be charitable about it) weird things. Yeah, there sure are. Consider TCI .. now there is an example of a fine, ethical, well run company (trying not to snicker) ... go look at http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/rfiteljx.html ... if you want to accept ARRL's version, and I see no reason not to, TCI is breaking Part 15 big time, and totally ignoring the FCC's request to bring themselves into compliance. When the FCC caught them, TCI agreed to take the offending devices out of service, and then once the FCC left the scene TCI went right back to business as usual, making a total shambles out of the 80 meter band. Not only is TCI ignoring the FCC's request to remove the offending equipment, they are actually installing more of it and making things worse than ever. You want to hear telephone calls from sometimes up to ten miles away? Tune 80 meters when you are in TCI's territory. Oh, don't worry about eavesdropping laws; 80 meters is a public place where anyone is allowed to listen or use amateur radio equipment. You obviously cannot repeat what you hear; it is not a *broadcast* or a transmission intended for the public. TCI likes to think of itself as a phone company in some places as part of its cable offerings. Wouldn't you love having your phone calls heard up to ten miles away on the radio? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Louis Raphael Subject: Re: Card Reader Type Public Phones Organization: Societe pour la promotion du petoncle vert Date: Sun, 02 May 1999 01:58:52 GMT Stephan Geis wrote: > FYI in Europe (at least in Switzerland and France) card readers are > standard on public telephones. In Switzerland the readers can now > handle both magnetic stripe cards and the chip-bearing "smartcards" > which are widely used not only for prepaid cards for phones, but for > bank cards and electronic purses. The readers on phones (unlike those > on ATMs here) are not able to swallow miscreant cards, however. Most of the Bell public phones in Quebec and maybe 1/2 of those in Ontario are similar. Incidentally, credit cards cannot be used in other phones, unlike in the States. Louis ------------------------------ From: Ed Ellers Subject: Legislation Passed to Tranform Satellite TV Date: Sat, 1 May 1999 19:07:18 -0400 Monty Solomon quoted from a {New York Times} story: "The legislation passed 422 to 1, with the lone dissenting vote cast by Representative Robert Brady, Democrat of Pennsylvania." Some reports say that he voted against the bill at the request of a labor union, but don't say which one. "It imposes a new "must carry" requirement backed by cable companies that mandates that satellite companies like Echostar Communications and Direct TV that decide to offer any local signals must also offer all local programming in those markets by 2002." Which means that only a few large cities will get "local-into-local" service between that time and the time that enough capacity can be obtained using spot beams to carry all stations in a reasonable number of cities. (Incidentally, anyone with a small satellite dish can still get whatever off-air TV s/he already had access to, either by connecting the antenna directly to the TV set or -- if the TV is fairly old or cheap -- connecting the antenna to the antenna input that *every* DBS receiver has. By contrast, cable customers who want to watch stations not on the cable system have to add an A/B switch.) "The legislation also follows recent court decisions that had threatened to reduce the attractiveness of satellite television to consumers by restricting its ability to broadcast signals of the major networks. Current law permits satellite companies to beam network signals if those customers cannot receive local stations using rooftop antennas." Actually, the law requires that a given home not be able to receive a signal below a certain specified intensity. If you *can* get that minimum level, but you have a lot of ghosting or neighborhood interference, tough toodles. "(The legislation) reduces the copyright fees on satellite companies for carrying superstation and distant network stations." Which are a lot higher than those levied on cable systems. Frankly, I don't see why either should have to pay copyright fees, since all a cable or satellite provider is doing is assisting a viewer in receiving a broadcast signal, and the providers have no control over the content of that signal. "And it eliminates a provision in the current law that requires consumers of cable television to wait for three months after they cancel their cable service before receiving satellite service." That provision only applies to network signals. ------------------------------ From: dlore@iname.com Subject: Cordless Phone Help Wanted Date: Sun, 02 May 1999 00:56:45 +0300 Please suggest a cordless phone that does not allow other cordless phones by accident or on purpose, to listen in to my conversation, or to bill their call to my phonebill (by their phone getting a dial tone or connecting to/from my cordless' base) ASAP ... 220v would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time, dlore@iname.com ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #68 *****************************