Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id DAA24372; Wed, 26 May 1999 03:53:06 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 03:53:06 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199905260753.DAA24372@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #100 TELECOM Digest Wed, 26 May 99 03:53:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 100 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Consulenza per aziende (Barbara Giussani) Re: Seeking Telephone Answering Software and Hardware (Anthony Naggs) Re: Bell Atlantic Service Problem Inquiry (Bill Feidt) Re: Long Distance Junk Faxes Advertising www.copierdirect (Hillary Gorman) Re: Judge Freezes Funds In Internet Scam (Thor Lancelot Simon) Re: Smartjack and CSU (Mel Beckman) Re: Sex Sites Getting Screwed (Joel B. Levin) Re: Using V&H to Calculate Distance (Andy McFadden) 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. 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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: Barbara Giussani Subject: Consulenza per aziende Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 12:21:27 +0200 Organization: Centro Servizi Interbusiness [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This came in the mail to the Digest. Would someone please read it to me and tell me what it says. I hope it is not spam of some kind :( Where you see numbers in parentheses below, there was originally a backslash followed by the number. This tells me there were some eight-bit characters in the message that would have wreaked havoc getting this out in the mail. In the past, sendmail has told me 'you cannot send 8-bit messages to 7-bit sites ...' nor, I suppose should you have 8-bit messages in 2-bit mailing lists. :( I wanted you to see the (apparently) octal representation of the characters inserted as it may have to do with the translation. Anyway, someone tell me what it says, and deal with it please. PAT] --------------------------- SEPI srl (350) una societ(340) specializzata da oltre un ventennio nel settore dell informatica. Stimolata dal legame sempre pi(371) stretto tra telecomunicazioni e computer, ha ora deciso di offrire un nuovo sevizio nel campo della telefonia per aziende. La liberalizzazione delle tariffe telefoniche ha prodotto nuove e sostanziali possibilit(340) di risparmio, tuttavia la scelta del miglior contratto diviene di giorno in giorno sempre pi(371) complessa. La neonata attivit(340) di consulenza consiste nell(222)individuare, grazie ad un sofisticato software, il miglior contratto di telefonia fissa e mobile sulla base delle caratteristiche del cliente, fornendo la soluzione pi(371) conveniente e pi(371) adatta alle qualit(340) specifiche del suo traffico telefonico. A garanzia di seriet(340), SEPI sottolinea la propria totale indipendenza da tutti i fornitori di telefonia mobile e fissa. Per informazioni Barbara Giussani SEPI Srl via della Betulla 11/13 20035 Lissone (MI) bgiussani@sepi.it http://www.sepi.it/ tel. 039 2456390 fax 039 460611 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 18:38:55 +0100 From: Anthony Naggs Subject: Re: Seeking Telephone Answering software and hardware Organization: Ubikuity After much consideration a reader decided to share these wise words: > I am seeking to design and build a telephone answering systems. > Hardware: > Can you recommend any PC telephone answering cards? How does > telephone cards integrated with sound card to play greetings and > record incoming messages and recognize DTMF key in reply from caller? Dialogic hardware is pretty good (www.dialogic.com) and there are other manufacturers of similar equipment which a web search should help you find. You may be able to what you want with a 'voice modem'. Which is a modem that can send/decode DTMF tones and WAVE (.wav) sound files. The quality is reputed to be quite variable, particularly on cheaper models. Top end models are probably the PhoneBlaster and IBM MWave. > Software: > Can you recommend how to write our own Microsoft Windows based > telephone answering software with caller ID and DTMF key in reply from > callers? Find out about TAPI, Microsoft's Telephony API, which should allow you to program many types of telephone hardware under Windows. However the TAPI drivers for some hardware, (e.g. Dialogic) are buggy and you may do better to use Dialogic's own API with their hardware. Visit the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.tapi newsgroup for more information, and check Bruce Pennypacker's TAPI FAQ for lots of info and book suggestions: http://members.tripod.com/~tapifaq Cheers, Anthony ------------------------------ From: wfeidt@cpcug.org (Bill Feidt) Subject: Re: Bell Atlantic Service Problem Inquiry Organization: Capital PC User Group, Rockville, MD USA Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 23:12:08 GMT Bill Feidt (wfeidt@cpcug.org) wrote: > Periodically, I lose dial tone on the line and hear a loud hum in its > place. The condition comes and goes, apparently without BA > intervention. It happens frequently enough (4 times so far this week) > and for suffiently extended periods (up to 12 hours continuous) to be > very disruptive. > I've reported the problem to BA three times so far. They send a > service tech out and by the time he arrives the problem has gone away. > BA has installed a demarc box and I've used that to verify that the > problem is "outside the house". A quick update on the situation. First, a big thank you to Pat and the others who responded. Brad Snow asked about my location, noting that BA covers a large area and procedures might well vary from on area to the next. I am in Montgomery County, Maryland. The problem continues, mainly in the mornings. As I noted, calling the main problem reporting 800 number does little good, since by the time the technician was dispatched, the problem had disappeared. The BA "customer advocate" group did follow up with me, however. They put me in touch with the area Supervisor, who seems to be very customer oriented and serious about trying to solve the problem. She gave me her direct office phone and told me to report outages there. This morning when the problem occurred again, I called and left a message. She returned my call early this afternoon with the news that they had been able to monitor the line while it was out of order and had localized the difficulty. She promised send a tech out to deal with it tomorrow at the latest (today they're busy catching up on thunderstorm related outages). If this woman is typical of BA's field supervision staff, they're hiring the right people. At this point, I'm most encouraged that the problem will finally be resolved. Again, thanks to all who responded. Bill wfeidt@cpcug.org [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do let us know if she is for real, or was just put on the line as a buffer for your calls. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hillary@hillary.net (hillary gorman) Subject: Re: Long Distance Junk Faxes Advertising www.copierdirect.net Date: 26 May 1999 00:49:16 GMT Organization: Debugging our net or deworming your pet... On 25 May 1999 15:33:00 GMT, wrote: [snipped story of being junkfaxed] > This time I called the Bell Atlantic Annoyance Call Center, and the > person I spoke with insisted that junk faxes were perfectly acceptable > -- "just another telemarketing technique", and that my only recourse I > had was to fax back the sender asking they remove me from their > database. > Any suggestions or comments? Yes, Mark, I have a comment. Here it is: the Bell Atlantic tech with whom you spoke was an ignoramus. Assuming you got its name, call back and tell its supervisor what it told you! But leaving aside the issue of the ignorant Bell tech, you still have the issue of the junk faxing. I think you might find it worth your while to file a claim. hillary gorman...........Official Token Female..........hillary@netaxs.com "So that's 2 T-1s and a newsfeed....would you like clues with that?" hillary@hillary.net: for debugging your net or deworming your pet Net Access...The NSP for ISPs....The NOC that rocks around the clock. ------------------------------ From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) Subject: Re: Judge Freezes Funds In Internet Scam Date: 26 May 1999 03:09:47 -0400 Organization: PANIX -- Public Access Networks Corp. Reply-To: tls@rek.tjls.com In article , Bob Goudreau wrote: >> Rather than have the FTC pursue >> individual perpetrators taking advantage of this confusion, it seems >> like it would be highly preferable for the FCC to dictate the use of >> the international dialing prefix and country code for calls to the >> Caribbean. > But under what criteria? If you're going to disqualify the non-US > NANP countries from being dialed from the US via 1+NPA dialing, then > why not Canada as well? What distinguishes Canada from, say, Jamaica > in this respect? Pricing, perhaps (the fact that lots of US long Oh, to my mind that's *very* simple. Canada is well-behaved, and the Carribean countries which harbor these telephonic scams are not. Certain nations, it seems to me, should be put on notice that their free ride in country code 1 will soon be over -- shape up or they'll be kicked out for bad behaviour. The FCC could mandate that direct dialing end, the NANPA administrator could deallocate the codes, and that would, by and large, be that. No more scam artists hiding behind the illusion that they were in the United States. No more sponging off the country code 1 international gateways, either. So the ITU would throw a fit. So what? The ITU is, by and large, a bunch of bureaucrats in eternal servitude to the European telecommunications equipment vendors. It'd be well worth it just to see them have to do something fast for once, instead of screwing up others' hard work very, very, *very* slowly. Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com "And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?" ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 17:10:18 -0700 From: Mel Beckman Subject: Re: Smartjack and CSU At 3:31 PM -0400 5/25/99, Kevin Lundy wrote: > The smartjack to CSU is probably 350' of cable. It is shielded CAT5 > run in conduit. According to Bell Atlantic, Maryland tarrifs prevent > smartjack location anywhere other than in the room with the DS3 > multiplexer. Three different Bell employees have told me this. Can > anyone confirm? > I've replaced all cable. Bell replaced the smart jack. Solved a > ground problem at the CSU (was within spec, but we made it better > anyway). Replace the CSU a second time. The smart jack is in a rack > of 20 other smart jacks, so I assume that if the rack had a bad ground > I wouldn't be the only one with a problem? > Problem still occurs. > At the CSU, we are seeing -6db signal level. The LBO was 0 (-6db is > an acceptable level?), but we adjusted it to 7.5. > Today, we did adjust the LBO, time will tell on that. Another > suggestion made by Gil was to check the ground resistance between > smart jack and CSU - they are actually in two different (connected) > buildings - how would I do that? > Any other thoughts or words of wisdom? Since you're still having problems, I think it's well worth going to the Kentrox-recommended shielded cable. This is not simply shielded Cat5, however. Shielded Cat5 has one shield for all conductors; Kentrox calls for the send and receive pairs having separate shielding. An easy way to achieve this is to use two runs of shielded Cat3 or Cat5 (both work equally well), running the send on one pair in one cable and the receive on another pair in another cable. I've used this technique to solve a many extended demarc problems -- it's never failed to work when the problem was signal quality. However, the best solution is to use the special D-screen or T-screen cable, which is specifically designed for extended demarcs and has two individually shielded pairs of 22-gauge copper. This cable is pretty bulky, though (oblong-shaped, about .25" by .5"), so you may have problems fitting it in existing conduit. Running 350' over Cat 5 is almost certain to give you problems, even in conduit, even shielded, because you're still subject to near-end cross talk between the send and receive lines. - Mel Beckman ------------------------------ From: levinjb@gte.net (Joel B Levin) Subject: Re: Sex Sites Getting Screwed Organization: On the desert Reply-To: levinjb@gte.net Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 20:53:31 GMT In , hapgood@pobox.com (Fred Hapgood) wrote: >> Those "carts" should time out after a while, unless the programmer was >> really stupid. Unlike a physical store, there are no actual "goodies >> sitting there" until the user completes the order. It's like filling >> out an order form from a mail-order catalog, and then not mailing it. > I disagree. These carts serve as custom catalogs and I love them. I disagree with your disagree. I think they should time out, but not for a week or so. You need to be able to think about your purchases sometimes. I just had to register with a site and put something into the cart to find out what it would cost me; my intention was to do some comparison shopping. In their case the s/w broke when I tried to add a second item, and the first is gone, which is OK, since I have decided not to buy -- at least I will but I'll probably use snail-mail for reliability (it's preprinted checks; I feel better sending them a sample than inputting all the magic numbers over the net). A week to think something over or comparison shop is reasonable; discarding unpurchased items after a week is reasonable to keep the merchandizers database in some order is OK too. In any case, the shopping cart should show the expiration date/time of items within it. Does any show that? JBL ------------------------------ From: fadden@netcom.com (Andy McFadden) Subject: Re: Using V&H to Calculate Distance Organization: Lipless Rattling Crankbait Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 20:58:19 GMT In article , Charlie C. wrote: >> Within North America, rate distance is calculated using the "V&H" system. >> V stands for "vertical" (north-south position) and H for "horizontal" >> (east-west position). Each exchange is represented by a location expressed >> as a V&H co-ordinate. A rate distance can be calculated from two V&H >> co-ordinate sets based on Pythagorean Theorem, i.e. rate distance = >> sqrt((V1-V2)^2+(H1-H2)^2)/10 where (V1,H1) is the V&H for one end of a >> call, and (V2,H2) represents the other end of a call. [...] >> rd = sqrt( (5080-6102)^2 + (1444-8901)^2 )/10 >> rd = sqrt( -1022^2 + -7457^2)/10 >> rd = sqrt( 1044484 + 55606849)/10 >> rd = sqrt( 56651333)/10 >> rd = 7526/10 >> rd = 752 >> This is obviously wrong, since Seattle is more that 752 miles from >> Piscataway. According to your formula, the distance is 7526 V&H units. There are 1670 feet in a V&H unit and 5280 feet in a mile, so you want to be dividing by (5280/1670 = 3.1617) rather than dividing by 10. Doing this yields 2380 miles, which sounds a whole lot better. Send mail to fadden@netcom.com (Andy McFadden) CD-Recordable FAQ - http://www.fadden.com/cdrfaq/ (a/k/a www.spies.com/~fadden) Fight Internet Spam - http://spam.abuse.net/spam/ & news.admin.net-abuse.email ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #100 ******************************