Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id RAA28072; Mon, 17 May 1999 17:11:34 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 17:11:34 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199905172111.RAA28072@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #85 TELECOM Digest Mon, 17 May 99 17:11:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 85 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Privacy Report Has Both Sides Scrambling For Spin (Lisa Hancock) Re: Email and Newsgroup Similarities (Randal L. Schwartz) Re: Oregon's 971 Partial Overlay of 503 (Randal L. Schwartz) Click-Click-Click: What Causes it? (eraimy@my-dejanews.com) Re: Facilities-Based Local Exchange Competition (John R. Levine) Re: Unsolicited FAX Spamming (EclectiJim) Re: Unsolicited FAX Spamming (John R. Covert) Re: 24-Hour 4.8c Long Distance (Fred Goldstein) Re: Which Cellular Provider Allows US/European Connectivity? (John Covert) Prepaid Phone Cards (William Wheeler) Delivery of Tariff Services (John Starta) Re: Subcriber Loop Test? (John Fricks) Re: The World's Free Web-Based Fax Service @ Fax4Free.com (Tom Heathcote) Re: Australian Pay Telephones (Darryl Smith) 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. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Privacy Report Has Both Sides Scrambling for Spin Date: 16 May 1999 21:25:21 GMT Organization: Net Access BBS Regarding the "privacy notice", I think that whole concept is pretty foolish. It's just another piece of micro-fine print that will only _confuse_ people, not enlighten them. And it will serve to eliminate liability of host sites that perhaps should be retained. I get "privacy statements" from my bank, the phone company, and even the cable company. They're long, hard to understand, and in the end, meaningless. For example, my cable company says it won't release anything to outsiders, but may use it internally. Well, the company is owned by Time Warner, a huge conglomerate, and there's lots of opportunities to use personal data. Regarding DNA records, I think the real concern ought to be not the "government" (which everyone seems to be excessively afraid of), but rather the private sector. Obviously, the government (any level) can be heavy handed and ruin a person. But normally there are constitutional checks in place that do protect people. It's important to remember that the private sector has NONE of those constitutional protections. Your employer has every legal right to listen to your phone calls, search your desk, search your body and papers, monitor your computer, and check your credit records. Proctor & Gamble forced the phone company to give up _home_ telephone records of employers it suspected of leaking secrets. When it comes to your employer, or anyone you choose to do business with, you have no "right" of privacy at all. Your only right is not to do business with such people. Some would argue "fine, don't do business with companies who won't respect your privacy". In theory, true. But today, with all the mergers, it's not so simple. In many industries, there's only one large player left, only "one game in town". Consumers, or more importantly, employees, no longer have a choice. Even when there's a couple of players, they tend to have eliminated any meaningful competition so well that they do as they please. Say you're a banking employee and aren't happy at your job. In the old days there were plenty of other large banks you could change to. Now there are very few, all have been bought out or merged. The same applies in almost any industry. Seven once independent hospitals in Phila are now under a single ownership, and that of a national company. Phila has only three major banks, all owned elsewhere. Say you work for one of these large companies and have a falling out with your supervisor. You get fired and your personnel record is blackballed. Your situation is no different than when the robber barons of the late 19th century would blackball a suspected union organizer or trouble maker. Unlike a credit card company, a prospective employer has no obligation to inform me if they decline to hire you on account of adverse information they uncover. There have been incidents where people suffered greatly, unable to find a job, because unbeknowst to them, there was adverse data floating around about them (and inaccurate data, but hard to locate and fix). Today, with computer databases so easy to set up, search, and distribute, the potential for abuse is greater. Sooner or later most of us will be seeking a new job and a new dwelling unit. (It's very rare nowadays to stay in one job and live in one place forever). Will we find ourselves blackballed and destined to work only as a fast food cook at minimum wage or live in a slum because of some nasty stuff buried in some database? People today seem to be more worried about encryption chips and the government spying on us. I think the real potential of abuse will be from the private sector. I think there's a great possibility some over-eager "property protection" manager will go too far. (Remember Henry Ford's internal security dept?) ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Email and Newsgroup Similarities From: merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) Organization: Stonehenge Consulting Services; Portland, Oregon, USA Date: 17 May 1999 11:02:38 -0700 TELECOM Digest Editor writes: > Now please note carefully: if you do NOT want your mail to be > piped through someone's .forward file, i.e. handled by his filter- > rules, etc ... then you put a backslash in front of his name. For > example mail to joeblow@site is subject to whatever .forward Joe > has in place. Maybe he sends the mail elsewhere, or maybe he uses > it as a way to pipe the stream into filtering, etc. But \joeblow@site > means the mail is to be delivered absolutely! to Mr. Blow's mailbox, > bypassing or ignoring any .forward, should one be present in his > directory. A backslash in front of something always means deal with > it just as written, ignoring any user-created aliases locally or > elsewhere which might have been put up for handling that instruction. Nope. This works locally, not remotely. I can put it in my local ..forward to say to deliver to \merlyn,someguy@remote.com, but I can't say \someguy@remote.com. It won't work. If you've seen it work, that's perhaps an artifact of an overly permissive sendmail.cf, but not the norm. Name: Randal L. Schwartz / Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 Keywords: Perl training, UNIX[tm] consulting, video production, skiing, flying Email: Snail: (Call) PGP-Key: (finger merlyn@teleport.com) Web: My Home Page! Quote: "I'm telling you, if I could have five lines in my .sig, I would!" -- me [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A single backslash "\" will not work when leaving this site and traveling across the net either. But a double backslash to start with on outgoing mail "\\" allows sendmail to take one off thinking it is supposed to deal literally with whatever follows, and when it does take one off, it sees the second one and makes that literal transaction, sending the second one as part of the recipient's email address. Try \\someguy@somewhere and see how that responds. Also, try only one backslash, but quoting it either in part or in whole, as in "\someguy@somewhere" and also "\someguy"@somewhere. The trouble with quotes is that sometimes the shell at the remote end thinks you are talking about 'backslash user' (as a name) rather than 'user' with a backslash in front of his name. And of course, 'backslash user' does not exist, and never did. PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Oregon's 971 Partial Overlay of 503 From: merlyn@stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) Organization: Stonehenge Consulting Services; Portland, Oregon, USA Date: 17 May 1999 11:08:11 -0700 Eric B Morson writes: > The Portland and Salem aareas in northwest Oregon will receive a 971 > overlay area code beginning January 30, 2000. > Permissive 10-digit local dialing will begin on July 11, 1999 and become > mandatory on January 30, 2000. > See the full text of the press release at: > http://AreaCode-Info.com/headline/1999/or990514.htm If I read this right, it means the end of being able to dial a seven-digit number from my house. From my 503- phone number, I'll need to dial "5 0 3 - xxx xxxx" to get across the street! Why in the creator's name are they eliminating that? I can dial local calls in San Jose with seven digits! Or is the article wrong? Is the rest of the country also eliminating seven-digit numbers too, and I just haven't caught on? Name: Randal L. Schwartz / Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 Keywords: Perl training, UNIX[tm] consulting, video production, skiing, flying Email: Snail: (Call) PGP-Key: (finger merlyn@teleport.com) Web: My Home Page! Quote: "I'm telling you, if I could have five lines in my .sig, I would!" -- me ------------------------------ From: eraimy@my-dejanews.com Subject: Click-Click-Click: What Causes It? Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 12:24:07 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. I just added a Radio Shack headset telephone, a handheld computer (Jornada) with a modem, a Radio Shack "telephone recording control," and a tape recorder to my telephone line. Now I hear a loud, steady click-click-click on some, but not all, incoming calls. Any suggestions? Thanks. ------------------------------ Date: 17 May 1999 13:07:39 -0400 From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: Facilities-Based Local Exchange Competition Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > I suspect the telecom landscape would be > *very* different if, instead of the states following the progressivist > notion that a regulated monopoly would be more efficient than > competing telcos, the Federal government had simply stepped in and > forced LECs to interconnect! Well, actually, in the Kingsbury Commitment in about 1919 Bell agreed to interconnect and to stop buying up other non-overlapping telcos, to get the trust-busters to back off. Regulation came later. Had that not happened, Bell might well have absorbed all of the independents, but I don't know that it would have made much practical difference. The idea of forced interconnection among telcos in the same city seems not to have been very popular until the 1980s. I suspect that back when the infrastructure was a gazillion open pair wires on poles, they didn't want any more wires and poles clogging the streets than necessary. Also, don't forget the universal service issue. Monopoly LECs agreed to serve everyone in the territory, averaging rates even though some customers were served at a loss. It's not at all clear to me that non-monopoly telcos would have agreed to do that. 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: 17 May 1999 13:12:55 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com From: eclectijim@aol.com (EclectiJim) Subject: Re: Unsolicited FAX Spamming > Do they honestly think anyone is dumb enough to reply to this? They do - and (unfortunately) they're right. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 07:57:13 -0400 From: John R. Covert Subject: Re: Unsolicited FAX Spamming Ted Ede wrote: > My guess is they simply gather the fax number from the domain > registrations on the Internic. I too received an international fax. Not in my case. My fax number is absolutely unlisted, not in the NIC database, not in any database. I do not give it out to businesses, but only to friends. The 900-number folks could have found it only by power dialing the exchange. And as I mentioned, all my phones have been ringing with a "beep-beep-beep" of an attempted fax. Terry Kennedy suggested contacting OFTEL, but OFTEL's database only supports UK numbers. Lawyers who think that Title 47 Section 227 of the U.S. Code applies to calls from England (if there is a U.S. company involved) are encouraged to contact me if they want to take the case on a contingency basis. /john ------------------------------ From: Fred Goldstein Subject: Re: 24-Hour 4.8c Long Distance Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 09:24:54 -0400 On Sat, 08 May 1999, Paul Cook wrote: > I often wondered why someone didn't do something like set up the old > system of dialing a local number, handing you a dial tone and having > you punch in a pin code and then the number you wanted to call. > My thought was that the rate for such calls should be cheaper since > there would be no "equal access" or 800 fee. And perhaps there would > be a calling card that wouldn't rip people off either by charging > enormous rates for connections or whatever miscellaneous call > surcharges are imposed. There is no "equal access" fee any more. If you're an IXC, you should be paying very similar rates regardless of the type of access you choose. If you're not OFFERED equal access, that's a different story ... but there are only a handful of rural indies that don't have it yet. There are unscrupulous carriers who attempt to take calls on "business" lines, rather than pay their access fees. In such cases the caller pays for a local call, which (as Pat noted in the case of early MCI) can be more than the "savings", or in a flat-rate area is simply money the ILEC is technically owed but not collecting. I don't know how long somebody can get away with this but I know of some "VoIP" IXCs who've done it for over a year; LECs seem rather remiss about enforcement these days. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 12:22:37 -0400 From: John R. Covert Subject: Re: Which Cellular Provider Allows US/European Connectivity? Charles Conn wrote: > I am looking for a cell phone provider that allows me to do the > following: > Have a cell phone which works in the US, but when I travel to Europe, > it will ring there as well (when someone calls my US phone number). There are three ways to do this: 1. Economically, with a GSM service provider. Various GSM providers can provide this capability. To look up the GSM providers in the United States, in order to find one in your area, you can go to the GSM Mou web site at http://www.gsmworld.com/ and select the GSM Info link at the top of the page. GSM in the United States and Canada operates at 1.9 GHz. In Europe and the rest of the world, it operates at 900 MHz and 1.8 GHz. This means that you must either own two phones or have a phone such as the Bosch Worldphone. I've chosen the two-phone route, since with GSM, your identity is in a smart card (SIM card) which you can move from phone to phone as needed. One of my phones (the Motorola 6000e) operates on 1.9 GHz, my other phone (the Motorola 8900) operates automatically on both 900 MHz and 1.9 GHz. They are identical form factors, and use the same batteries and other accessories. I use Omnipoint, where incoming calls from the U.S. are 99 cents per minute, including both LD and airtime, pretty much anywhere in Europe. See http://www.omnipoint.com/ for info about them. I signed up with them when they first began offering service in NYC even though I live in the Boston area, intending to use them only on travel to Europe. I didn't even buy a U.S. phone until a year later when they launched their Boston service. 2. Somewhat more expensively, with AT&T's service which requires you to be a customer of AT&T wireless, pay an additional annual fee, and then $2.95 per minute for your calls. High fees for renting a phone, too. 3. Horribly expensively, with Iridium. One of the problems with Iridium is that it will only fall back to somewhat reasonably priced cellular roaming if you're in an area with ground-based systems that are compatible with your home area's land-based systems, which rules out Europe. > I assume that I would have to call the cellular provider and inform > them of when I would be in Europe, and they would turn on service > during this window. Is this how it works? With GSM, it is completely automatic. When you are roaming, all of your features, including the ability to SEND AND RECEIVE text messages (even email in the case of Omnipoint), work seamlessly no matter where you are as long as there are roaming agreements. Omnipoint has agressively sought out roaming agreements in every part of the world where there is GSM. If you don't have a European phone, Omnipoint will rent you a phone for use when in Europe at very attractive prices. Unlike the typical $95/week charge to rent a phone with the company recommended by AT&T, Omnipoint, the last time I checked, would rent phones for about $10/week. John Starta wrote: > Finding service is going to be a challenge; everyone I've approached has > said no thanks. Let me know if you have better luck. I have no idea what your problem was. Omnipoint was eager to sign me up, even before I lived in an area where they provided service. They FedEx'd me my SIMcard, and my service worked immediately and flawlessly on my first trip to Europe after signing up. /john ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 10:04:32 -0700 From: William Wheeler Organization: so many books too little time Subject: Prepaid Phone Cards Hi Pat, Very long time no talk with (8 to 10 years). A long time ago you were selling prepaid Phone Cards. I got some from you. I loved them they worked very well for me. If you have anything now or later you are selling Pls to put me on your List. Thanks, william wheeler ( was dragon or wwheeler at agora.rain.com back then runing a AMIGA 3000) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Back around 1991 or '92 when prepaid phone cards were new and sort of a novelty, I had them available here as part of a Beta test for the company which was issuing them on behalf of AT&T. There were $2, $5 and $10 denominations issued. They were just rather plain-looking scraps of paper, a lot like a bus ticket or similar. I sold out the supply I had and heard nothing more about it. Then someone in that industry got wise, and started making them on thin pieces of plastic -- much thinner and more plyable than credit cards -- just 1/32 of an inch thick perhaps -- with some beautiful pictures on one side, and the name(s) of affinity groups which were to resell them to members, etc. The trouble was, some pictures were 'too beautiful' and instead of using the cards, thus relieving telco of a bit of its cash reserves acquired when it sold the card in the first place through three or four levels of brokers which is what caused the price to be 50-75 cents per minute of talk time as all the brokers got their piece of the action, the cards became collector items. People hoarded the cards, much as a stamp collector might do, or someone who is into baseball trading cards, with pictures of their sports heros. There were even a couple of monthly magazines started which were devoted to 'phone card collecting', with classified ads from people with cards to sell or trade, etc, and always wonderful graphics with displays of the latest cards available and where to buy them. Soon, the 'rare' cards -- those of limited issue with some particularly stunning graphic on the back -- became worth more money if totally unused than their face value if telco had to pay it off with calls. I've not heard anything from the phone card collectors in quite a while and do not know if it is still their hobby or not. There were lots and lots of them, and I am sure telco was pleased to encourage their habit. After all, the United States Postal Disservice has always been encouraging of stamp collector clubs, especially those clubs which collect pristine, or unused stamps of rare denominations. The USPS in fact even has its own 'mailing list'; a large number of people in its 'First Day of Issue' club. Every time USPS has a new denomination stamp available, members of their club receive in the mail an envelope (which costs about three cents) with a copy of the new stamp affixed (which costs the stamp value), manually can- celled with postal indicia which includes the phrase 'First Day of Issue' (which costs whatever they pay the clerk who does the work). The indicia very carefully does NOT cover the stamp itself, so as not to deface it in any way. Then your credit card gets a charge of ten dollars or something. At the main post office in Chicago, one window clerk deals exclusively with stamp collectors, and has a beautiful catalog of unusual US postage stamps which one may purchase (whole sheets only please, no individual stamps) for the face-value of the sheet of stamps. Naturally, they never expect to have to redeem any of them in actual use. Sprint was one of the big promoters of 'phone card collectors'; maybe they still are. On the back side of their glossy, high quality thin-plastic things, just a tiny reference to Sprint with its logo up in one corner of the card, sitting transparently on a brilliant background devoted to the affinity group which made the card for its members. If one was ever presented at a pay phone to make a call, probably the operator would go into shock. PAT] ------------------------------ From: John Starta Subject: Delivery of Tariff Services Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 10:56:56 -0700 Organization: Frontier GlobalCenter Inc. I need some advice. I'm trying to order a tariff service from my telco (USWest) and they're refusing delivery saying either 1) I'm too far away from the CO; or 2) the switch/CO is incapable of providing the service. (Their reason alternates depending upon the department I speak with.) I know for a fact that I'm not too far away as I have ISDN service, and the network disclosure information they have filed with the local utilities commission indicates that all switches/CO's servicing my city are capable. Is there some way of forcing USWest to uphold their commitment? Aren't telco's required to deliver tariff services? jas ------------------------------ From: John Fricks Subject: Re: Subcriber Loop Test? Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 01:33:05 GMT For Teradyne products, go to http://www.teradyne.com For the 4TEL test systems specifically, go to http://www.teradyne.com/prods/ttd/products/ttdprod.html 4TEL is a well-known line test system. Look at its specifications and note the relevant ITU, IEEE, Bellcore, etc. standards. These are the standards which will define the tests. ------------------------------ From: tom@nospam.demon.co.uk (Tom Heathcote) Subject: Re: The World's Free Web-Based Fax Service @ Fax4Free.com Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 04:27:53 +0100 Mike Pollock wrote... > If you don't mind banner ads running down the side of your document, > you can fax (but not spam) for free! > http://www.fax4free.com I notice that "The World's Free Web-Based Fax Service" only offers free faxing to the USA, and promises ("coming soon") merely that faxes to other countries will use "the least cost pricing available". It seems to me that this hardly makes it "free" or "the world's". Although it may be the best option for faxes to the US. If you want to send free faxes elsewhere I suggest you take a look at . Coverage varies from area to area and country to country. Some countries have complete coverage* - the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, Hong Kong, Nicaragua, Lebanon, San Marino and (surprisingly) Botswana. * They claim complete coverage, although premium-rate and some mobile-phone and other special-rate codes seem to be excluded, at least from the UK coverage. But still, I don't suppose many people have their fax machines on such numbers anyway. Tom Heathcote TomHeathcoteemailcom ------------------------------ From: Darryl Smith Date: Mon, 17 May 1999 10:38:48 +1000 Organization: Quite poor Subject: Re: Australian Pay Telephones The markets for Phone Cards vs. Smart Cards are different. Here in Australia EVERY public phone accepts a stored value card (Usually a smart card, although there are a few magnetic phones around still). The only exceptions are the occasional public phone in a milk bar and the like, and the also rare credit card phone. People in Australia expect to be able to go to any phone anywhere, put in their card and make a local call. And it does work that way. At railway stations there are usually people making quick calls to arrange lifts, and they do not need cash in their pocket. For Mother's Day, homeless children on the streets were given phone cards (Smart Cards) to ring their families ... The call cost is about 40c Australian, which is just over 30c USA. However usage of public phones is not what it once was -- we now have about 33% of the population owning a mobile, and over 90% of the POPULATION covered. I don't know what percentage of the land mass has mobile coverage, but I would guess at below 25%. Darryl Smith Sydney, Australia [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ah yes, Mother's Day. Reminds me of the time a number of years ago when Sprint did something similar. They had representatives give out about fifty cents worth of prepaid plastic to all the young guys they could find around 42nd Street in Manhattan and particularly around 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue at the Port Authority bus terminal so they 'could call their mothers and let them know they were doing okay ...' Frightened Mothers who probably drove the poor kid out of the house to start with, but that's another story ... Anyway, the public relations people who handed out the cards failed to let the left side of the brain at Sprint know what the right side was doing; no one bothered to remember that Sprint does not honor its own cards -- let alone any other telco cards, where it actually has to pay off in a settlement -- at any pay phones in a couple of central offices serving midtown Manhattan. Too much phone fraud, you know ... So none of the cards worked! Oh, they would work okay in parts of Queens, or out on Long Island somewhere, where Nice People live, but not around 42nd Street where Bad Boys and Bad Girls encounter Nice People who lure them away to a place where they can crash overnight. And you probably thought the time one part of Sprint was promising a free modem to all new customers while another part of Sprint was busy denying such a deal existed was a fiasco! Or maybe the time Sprint reps were excitedly telling new customers about free calling on Friday while the employee-who-never-took-phone-calls-and-always-was-away-from- his-desk was busy cancelling out those customers was the one that took the cake. Sprint had just come off of litigation where they settled out of court with a woman whose son had gotten a calling card hassle with Sprint, but they don't learn very well. You may recall that time the kid wanted to see the world, and although mother was concerned, she let the kid go check things out with a Greyhound 30-day Ameripass and a Sprint calling card issued in her name so he could call home if he 'got in any trouble'. As to be expected, small-town innocent kid lands at Port Authority and within an hour or so has already made a very poor judgment regards some new friends. He gets cuffed around a bit and everything -- clothes, Walkman, money -- stolen by Bad Boys who make sure the kid understands how they do business there. Well, the kid has that Sprint PIN memorized, and goes right to the pay phone to call his mother. Sprint won't honor the card, and after mother wastes a sufficient amount of time on hold with customer service and others files suit. They talk her into settling the matter with a handful of 'Pay to the Order of the Telephone Company' coupons -- a rather big handful -- the same technique AT&T uses; let the local telco figure out who to charge these back to if they ever do; with luck the indicia will be so illegible and the coupons so tattered and torn after a couple weeks in the back office telco will charge them back to one of our competitors instead in error or maybe have to write them off locally when telco can't figure out who they got them from or who to charge back; anyway our hands are now washed. (ha!ha!). Well, Sprint gets rid of that Complainer then has a case of amnesia and goes around giving essentially worthless plastic to street children in Manhattan. A good time was had by all, believe me you. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #85 *****************************