Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id RAA13327; Sat, 24 Apr 1999 17:00:05 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 17:00:05 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199904242100.RAA13327@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #55 TELECOM Digest Sat, 24 Apr 99 17:00:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 55 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson The NANP Has 8+ Years to Go Says NANPA (Eric Morson) Re: The NANP Has 8+ Years to Go Says NANPA (Jeffrey J. Carpenter) Re: Last Laugh! Not a Thing For the House of God (Ed Kummel) Graybar Electric (Mike O'Dorney) Re: Lawsuit Says MCI 'Redlines' (Alan Boritz) Re: Lawsuit Says MCI 'Redlines' (Walter Dnes) Re: Who Invented the Telephone? (Adam H. Kerman) Re: Local Calls Being Billed by IXC - Update (Bill Levant) Re: Local Calls Being Billed as Intra-LATA Through IXC (Stanley Cline) Re: AT&T Discontinues Easy Reach 500 Number Service (J.R. Light) 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@AreaCode-Info.com (Eric B. Morson) Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 18:50:03 -0400 Subject: The NANP Has 8+ Years to Go Says NANPA Looks like the first REAL steps have been taken to evaluate just how SOON the NANP will be in SERIOUS jeopardy as a whole. The NANP Exhaust Study has been published.... http://www.nanpa.com/pdf/NANP_Exhaust_Study.pdf VERY informative ... they now project total exhaustion between 2006 and 2012, with their best guess being 2007... 8 1/2 years to go! NO FCC action recommended regarding 10-D or 11-D dialing yet. No timetable for expansion yet. No FCC mandate for implementing expanding dialing patterns from 3+7 to 4+8 with a deadline for launch. How about deciding IF 4+8 will be the solution? When the projected total exhaustion of the NANP was 2025-2030, it was reasonable to think that yet-uninvented technologies that would reduce the amount of phone numbers needed would save us before we ran out of NPA-NXX resources. Now it seems much less likely, with an ever shrinking 8 1/2 years to go, that technology will save the NANP from disaster. How can planning wait any longer, considering how much hardware, software, education, politics, and regulation needs to be completed, and only 8.5 years to go? Not to mention, it's not JUST the United States! It's not just an American problem! Add international relations, tariffs, and politics to the mix when you include Canada and the Caribbean nations. (That's my diatribe for the day) Eric B. Morson Co-Webmaster AreaCode-Info.com (203) 348-3258 mailto:Eric@AreaCode-Info.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But a very good diatribe it was, and one that should give us all something to think about. Aren't things starting to get a little ridiculous here? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 19:43:40 -0400 From: Jeffrey J. Carpenter Subject: Re: The NANP Has 8+ Years to Go Says NANPA Eric@areacode-info.com wrote: > Looks like the first REAL steps have been taken to evaluate just how > SOON the NANP will be in SERIOUS jeopardy as a whole. > The NANP Exhaust Study has been published ... This is obviously going to generate a lot of discussion in the industry. The CTIA has already submitted a letter to the NANC questioning the methodology the NANPA used. Their submission is available at: http://www.wow-com.com/lawpol/filing/pdf/ctialtr042299.pdf Jeffrey J. Carpenter P.O. Box 471 Glenshaw, PA 15116-0471 Phone: +1 500 488-4800 Fax: +1 500 488-4802 Email: jjc@pobox.com Web: http://pobox.com/~jjc/ ------------------------------ From: Ed Kummel Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Not a Thing For the House of God Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 01:32:23 -0100 An Israel company has developed a small device that sets up a small area (about 500 square feet) that will block all radio signals in the 800-1000 and the 1900 MHz bands. There is talk of these devices making it into the US and being used in places like movie houses, churches and being deployed at golf tournaments. A cell phone, even if it is not on a call, periodically polls the system to see what power output it will need to make a call (the phone will vary the power output up to .6 watts on handhelds and upto 3 watts on transportables). Most analog phones will try and "contact" a nearby system once every 5 to 15 minutes depending on the last contact. If it cannot make a connection, it ups the power and tries again (to prove this, keep your phone on and check how long the battery lasts. Then shield the phone (usually by placing it in a microwave ... no don't cook it, just leave it there) and the battery will last 2-3 times longer) Because of this stepped power increase, the chance of freq harmonics, triple beats and third harmonics *MAY* potentially create a frequency (by interacting with other neighboring frequencies, a third different freq can occur) that may interfere with navigation systems (which usually operate in the 2GHz and 1 GHz range. So, yes, it is a possibility. > We've been through discussion about such devices on airplanes, > regarding possible interference with the aircraft communication > system. Even with such devices turned off, do the wireless signals > (for *incoming* pages and cellular calls) still make it into the > aircraft? A turned-on cellu- lar phone can make outgoing calls and I > can understand concern about unfamiliar devices causing said > interference, but if *incoming* signals make it into the aircraft, is > any interference caused by connection to said devices? (I'm thinking > it might be seen as harder to enforce "incoming allowed but no > outgoing", and the atmosphere for such an inquiry might be poisoned by Remember the law of squares. The power disapates proportional to the distance. So a .6 watt phone next to a wall can penetrate it easier than a 6 watt signal can at several miles away! > recent incidents like those people trapped in airplanes on the tarmac > for several hours in Detroit?) You do see phones being available on > some aircraft, and presumably they have been cleared of any > interference (does the airline make money on such calls?). > (I remembered seeing something -- not in the Digest? -- long ago about > the President of the U.S. being able to respond, from 30,000 feet up, > to a breaking development. And we just heard of the plane carrying > the Russian premier turning around in flight.) The phone system on a plane is completly different than the wireless systems we use here on the ground. The call coming into the airplane is transmitted to the specific aircraft based on it's transponder. An array of antennas are specifially installed to collect these phone calls and then send them to the individual seats on the airplane using what is basically a standard PBX type system! Also, it is possible that using the new Iridium satellite phone (near a window of course) you could make a phone call while on a flying aircraft, and two way paging is possible with their new satellite (truely satellite, no ground stations involved!... like with regular pagers) pagers. >A pager, on an airplane or anywhere else, cannot send outgoing signals. Uh ... hate to shatter this myth, I have my Skytel 2way pager with me right now. At work I use a RIM two way. Check out the RIM 950. An awsome pager with a keyboard that is barely larger than a standard text pager. www.goamerica.com. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I do not know if the Chicago Symphony > Orchestra has ever addressed the question of 'vibrator mode' on > pagers. I am sure they would be reasonable about it. Their main > problem for a long time was cell phones which rang and pagers which > beeped throughout concerts. They rightfully put a stop to that with > their insistence to either turn the device off or leave it behind. It comes down to, show a little restraint and respect for others. I mean, if someone's phone goes off, refrain from flaming that individual. (Who knows, they may be packing.) And also, remember that if you are going to be in a "quiet" area (you know where they are) then put your phone on vibrate mode (if your phone doesn't have a vibrate mode, you can get vibrating batteries for most model phones. I've even seen a vibrating pen that clips in your shirt pocket and will vibrate silently whenever your phone should ring!) Ed [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Some disruptions cannot be helped, and are even a little humorous. Back in the 1960's, long before cellular phones were invented, and pagers were relatively rare, I was at Symphony one evening when such a thing happened. The conductor at the time was a fellow named Fritz Reiner. Fritz was a very stern-looking, no-nonsense sort of fellow. He had just finished greeting the audience, and turned his back facing the orchestra to begin the performance. The audience was silent, he raised his baton, but in the instant before the music began, someone in the audience sneezed. Not just a quiet, dainty little sneeze mind you, but a huge, very loud, snorting noise, the kind that invariably wrenches your neck out of shape and sometimes sprains your back if you are not careful. The kind that reverberates all over an acoustically well built auditorium, bouncing off the walls and back at you, etc. Poor Dr. Reiner ... he lowered his baton, and turned around and faced the audience once again, and after looking around the hall, he said, "you know, those things usually come in twos or threes; should I wait a minute or so longer for the rest of it?" He continued, "I am looking now at the person who did it; he is appropriatly mortified and I will not identify him. I know it could not be helped." At which point he broke his usual stern look and tried to keep from laughing but he could not help it. "Now be quiet for the next 37 minutes, would you please?" ... and he turned once again to the orchestra and started the performance. The next day's {Chicago Tribune} reviewed the program as usual, and mentioned the incident. Years later, when the 'no cell phones or pagers' rule was implemented, the sneezing incident was recalled in the little printed notice given out to the audience as part of the evening's program: "The Trustees of the Orchestral Association realize that bodily functions such as sneezing and coughing cannot be easily controlled. However a cellular phone or pager left in operating mode is inexcusable, and a reason that a patron with same would be asked to excuse others present as they remained in his absence to enjoy the presentation. Please turn off such devices before you enter the Hall to avoid a possible con- frontation with Staff and the resulting embarassment to yourself and others present." Makes sense to me! :) PAT] ------------------------------ Date: 24 Apr 1999 04:21:16 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com From: modorney@aol.com (Mike O'Dorney) Subject: Graybar Electric > Ironically, Gray and Enos Barton were the founders of the firm of > Gray and Barton which was eventually renamed Western Electric. He > didn't do too badly for himself, telephone or not, and went on to earn > huge sums of money for his patents including the harmonic telegraph > and teleautograph. (When Western Electric spun off it's non-telephone > electrical products division in 1927 they combined the names of the > founders to form the name "Graybar" which is still around today.) I seem to remember a Barr being a financier of Gray's efforts, but I lack any details. The Barr family was an old-line finance family of the day and were involved in many tecnology endeavors. Mike O'Dorney ------------------------------ From: aboritz@CYBERNEX.NET (Alan Boritz) Subject: Re: Lawsuit Says MCI 'Redlines' Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 11:08:12 -0400 In article by brettf@netcom.com: (TELECOM Digest Editor noted) >> Now let's get on with Mr. Haylock's problem. AT&T has been illegally >> redlining inner city neighborhoods for years. The only difference is, >> they teach their operators and supervisors to *lie about it* and make >> up some other excuse instead. > If what you say is true, AT&T has not only been flouting the law for > years, they have been doing it in a manner that is trivial to detect, > trivial to prove, and with respect to a politically hot issue. No, it's arrogant and snotty, and I wrote about it in this digest when AT&T did it to me in an urban Detroit neighborhood, a few years ago. > I simply don't think that none of the various minority-rights groups > have ever bothered to get two people to place simultaneous > calling-card calls to the same place from two different phones, one in > a "good" neighborhood and one in a "bad" neighborhood. Repeat this > expperiment once a week for a month or two, and do it in several > cities. If AT&T is behaving as you suggest, they should have a pretty > airtight case pretty quickly. And the financial resources needed to do > this test are minimal. (In fact, wouldn't at least one of the Chicago > area TV stations be interested in performing this test with you and > airing the results?) You'd be surprised how little modern broadcast journalists can comprehend on the subject of consumer fraud if they can't experience it in the context of an AOL chat room. The carriers who are redlining neighborhoods assume that you're probably not going to file a complaint, and hoping that (in the event you actually do file one) a regulatory agency may find the issue too trivial to pursue. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Journalists do not understand telco inner workings any better than any other member of the public. For example, in the May, 1988 fire at the Illinois Bell central office in Hinsdale, the next day's (Monday) {Chicago Tribune} and {Sun-Times} devoted a paragraph or two each to the story, a sort of 'oh, by the way, there was a fire yesterday at the phone company office in Hinsdale' ... they had no idea -- no understanding at all -- of the magnitude and seriousness of the situation. It was only after none of *their* cellular phones and *their* pagers would operate that day as a result that they caught on that a fire in a telco central office is not quite the same as a fire in an old shack on the side of town somewhere. In the Tuesday papers, they were screaming about it when the realization finally sank in that a terrible, terrible thing had happened. Lots of luck getting them to understand telco billing practices. They still have not figured out the internet very well. PAT] ------------------------------ From: waltdnes@interlog.com (Walter Dnes) Subject: Re: Lawsuit Says MCI 'Redlines' Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 05:46:30 GMT On Tue, 20 Apr 1999 01:25:13 GMT, in comp.dcom.telecom TELECOM Digest Editor noted: > Maybe it is time for Judge Harold ("I hate AT&T") Greene to > come out of retirement and do something useful for a change. > Said the spokes-person, "maybe he could authorize the write > off I was faced with last year; a couple million dollars in > the third quarter is a bit more than the customer service > reps are allowed to write off on their own. It had to > go way above my manager's head before it could be posted." > So who do you sympathize with? I think with some pressure, > telcos could do something about it. Pressure? ... hello ... > Judge Greene, are you reading this? PAT] The politically easy response is "make the big bad telco pay". But the "big bad telco" simply racks up an expense on its balance sheet and raises its rates correspondingly, to stay at the top of its allowed profit margin range. Forcing cards to be accepted from all districts is effectively a tax on all telephone users. Even if you still believe it's fair, it shouldn't be ordered by a bunch of political appointees in a public utilities commission. It rightfully belongs in a tax bill. At least be upfront and honest about it. You're advocating a tax on all telephone users to pay for higher write-offs. Fine, let's see a bunch of politicians vote for that tax. Walter Dnes procmail spamfilter http://www.interlog.com/~waltdnes/spamdunk/spamdunk.htm ------------------------------ From: Adam H. Kerman Subject: Re: Who Invented the Telephone? Organization: Chinet - Public Access since 1982 Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 19:27:41 GMT In article , Andrew Emmerson wrote: > All credit to Meucci -- and to Reiss, Bourseuil, Gray and all the other > inventors of the telephone! Thank goodness for intellectual property law to help keep history straight. ------------------------------ From: Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 11:50:07 EDT Subject: Re : Local Calls Being Billed by IXC - Update Reply-To: Wlevant@aol.com Thanks to all who wrote about this one. I had a fascinating conversation with a customer service rep at Bell Atlantic a few days ago. She thought I was hallucinating the entire thing until (a) she looked up the calls and found out that they are ABSOLUTELY supposed to be rated local, (b) I told her, in explicit detail -- thanks, TELECOM Digest -- what they had done wrong in the switch, why that caused this particular problem, and what needed to be done to fix it, and (c) when she put me on hold to talk to "toll investigations", she found out that someone else had just called to report the EXACT same problem. I would have been first to report it, but I was stuck in traffic, and didn't get to make the call until about 8:30 AM. :( The upshot -- to date -- is that someone who can actually fix the problem is supposed to call me tomorrow morning. If the *right* person calls me, it should be a five-minute fix. Allegedly, BA will eat the charges for the mis-routed calls, though I may have to pay MCI/Worldcom (whose fault it *isn't*) and get credit back from BA (my IXC calls are not billed on my BA bill). And, yes, until I started tossing around terms like "CO trunk routing", they tried to blame my modem. Interestingly, though, during this chat, I came to understand why telco people blame modems for misrouting/misbilling problems, even though -- as the BA rep finally conceded -- the CO switch can't tell the difference between me dialing and my modem dialing. It's actually kinda obvious, once you think about it : -- Once you program a modem to dial 10 digits, it will do so EVERY time; -- Until 10-digit dialing is mandatory, people generally don't dial 10 digits; -- ISP's and other incoming-data-call customers tend to be served by CLEC's, because of how the reimbursements work; -- Presumably, Bell forgets to update its translations more often for CLEC-served central office codes than for their own; -- If a problem exists ONLY when dialing 10 digits, and ONLY when calling a CLEC-served number, it will appear MOST FREQUENTLY on modem-dialed calls, since(manually) dialing up a modem from the bedroom phone just to listen to the tones is NOT how most people have fun. Q.E.D. More on this later. Bill ------------------------------ From: roamer1@pobox.com (Stanley Cline) Subject: Re: Local Calls Being Billed as Intra-LATA Through IXC Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 02:18:06 GMT Organization: how, with all the spam? Reply-To: roamer1@pobox.com On Mon, 19 Apr 1999 22:19:52 EDT, Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) wrote: > Calls from my home (610)275-xxxx to AOL's new local numbers > (610)234-0528 and (610)233-0511 are now being billed on my IXC's > invoice as INTRA-LATA calls ! > (610)275 and (610)233 have the same "name-place", and are therefore > presumptively local calls; (610)234 is one town over, in a name-place > that is ALSO local from here. > (610)233 and (610)234 are provided by CLEC's. > I assume that someone at Bell screwed up the routing tables in the > (610)275 CO switch. This seems to be happening quite a bit lately -- with more and more CLECs coming into the market, intraLATA PIC, NPA splits, etc. Example #1: Tennessee recently ordered BellSouth to provide intraLATA PIC. Right after intraLATA PIC went into effect, my parents (who are physically in Georgia, but are so close to Chattanooga that they are covered by the Tennessee tariff under a long-standing agreement between GA and TN) chose Qwest as their intraLATA carrier (they were already using them for interLATA) and on the next phone bill, there were a large number of of calls to their Powertel PCS phone -- whose number is a local call from their house (706-866 home, 423-314 Powertel) -- in the Qwest section of the bill. I did some testing and it appeared there were only three prefixes affected: two of Powertel's three Chattanooga prefixes, and Sprint PCS's one. (Curiously, ChaseTel/Cricket Communications and AT&T/TCG prefixes were *not* affected.) Since then Bell appears to have fixed the local/1+ translations but still has the 0+ ones wrong (0+ calls to the three prefixes go to Qwest instead of BellSouth as all other local calls do.) Example #2: I work for a major ISP; we regularly receive reports from customers who were billed toll to call our POPs, most of which are served by CLECs. Sometimes this is the customer's fault: * customer dials a number that is not truly local * customer forgets to reconfigure dialer after traveling * etc. Other times it is a telco's fault: * bad translations (most often, call routed over a LD trunk group when the call should be routed over a local trunk group; in other cases, problems caused by recent NPA splits, intraLATA PIC, etc.) * lack of interconnection agreement between independent LECs and our CLECs, such that calls to ILEC and wireless numbers in local rate centers are local but calls to a CLEC number in the same rate center are not (this seems to be especially common in the Carolinas for some odd reason) * etc. Our customer support folks *always* advise customers to check with their LEC to make sure the call is in fact local, but some appear to be getting bad or no information from ILEC operators, business office, phone books, etc. We do license a database of local calling areas, but it is far from perfect (many independents do not show up at all, Chicago/NYC metro/Boston/etc. local calling areas are not represented correctly, etc.) SC ("long time no post to c.d.t") ------------------------------ From: jlt@ihgp4.ih.lucent.com (-Light,J.R.) Subject: Re: AT&T Discontinues Easy Reach 500 Number Service Date: 24 Apr 1999 00:51:28 GMT Organization: Lucent Technologies R.I.P. 500 Service. It is a shame that this service is ending. I had found the service to be great in the beginning, certainly since I had picked my own seven digit home number to be my 500 number, my family never had to remember anything more than the 500 prefix. Calls were forwarded to anywhere I travelled and rerouted promptly. Last year it became obvious that AT&T did not want to keep the service. The fees and rates went skyward so ... I reduced my service to the basic plan, waited to see what AT&T planned and finally dropped it completely last month. The rates are no longer reasonable, 50 cents a minute from payphones vs 25 cents on the one rate calling card plan. International rates are NONSENSE. Guess it is true, price it right and people will come, price it wrong and people will leave. (Unless thats what you want). ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #55 *****************************