Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id BAA05182; Sun, 25 Apr 1999 01:27:34 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 01:27:34 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199904250527.BAA05182@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 #57 TELECOM Digest Sun, 25 Apr 99 01:27:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 57 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Use of Cellular Phones in Schools (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: Last Laugh! Not a Thing for the House of God (Arthur Ross) Re: Local Calls Being Billed as Intra-LATA Through IXC (Fred R. Goldstein) Re: Local Calls Being Billed as Intra-LATA Through IXC (Joshua Thompson) Re: Lawsuit Says MCI 'Redlines' (L. Winsom) Re: The NANP Has 8+ Years to Go Says NANPA (John R. Levine) Re: Sprint PCS Loses Too ... (Ryan Tucker) Re: Local Calls Billed by IXC -- FIXED, it Seems ! (Bill Levant) Hearing on Viruses Becomes Debate on Privacy (Monty Solomon) CA Legislative Info Wanted (Rich Andrews) Please, Help (Derek Sekala) 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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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 00:12:43 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Use of Cellular Phones in Schools After the horrible incident this past week at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO, many school administrators are now rethinking the ban in place in many schools on the possession of cell phones on school grounds. It appears that at the the height of the incident at Columbine, while much of the shooting was going on, local police received numerous calls from students at the school to report the incident. Police say that part of the reason for their early response at the scene were the numerous calls to 911 which 'piled in on top of each other' in a matter of a minute or two not only from landline phones in the building but also from students using cell phones who actually had the killers in their sight and were able to describe them and narrate their actions to police as the massacre was going on. In an emergency conference call between administrators of large school districts in the United States on Wednesday, in the aftermath of the Columbine affair, the question came up, 'would the situation have been worse than it was -- if that is conceivable -- if the students who aided police by using their cellular phones inside the school to talk to police officers who were gathering outside the school had been unable to do so.' No consensus was reached, however one point that brought agreement between several of the conferees was that while cellular phones are certainly no substitute for school safety and security, a student who is able to report an incident immediatly rather than have to go to a teacher or the school office to use the phone -- with a few minutes wasted in the process -- should be encouraged to do so. I think I would agree. ===================================== Some personal thoughts -- this being Sunday, my sermon for this week: How much worse are things going to become in the USA? We have a president who tells parents they have to be careful about keeping their children from seeing a lot of violent images; meanwhile he continues throwing bombs with abandon at Yugoslavia. Does he not understand that children see that also? Maybe the Yugoslavians and their friends the Russians will get enough of it one of these days and start throwing some bombs in our direction. My oh my, wouldn't Dollar Bill be the righteous and offended one. "Of all the nerve," he would probably say. This past week the press reports that there have been dozens of arrests all over the United States of teenagers who not only made mock of the events in Littleton, which they are free to do I guess under the First Amendment no matter how much it hurts others, but in addition were making plans to act out the same scenario in their own school. Now suddenly this past week, wearing a black trench coat has become fashionable. What *is* going on in our society? Will someone please tell me and help me to understand? We used to have years between major tragedies that shook our concious- ness; then at least a few months; now in the past couple years it seems we are bombarded with one ugly incident after another, never a break in stride, never a pause. An incident similar to Littleton occurred a couple years ago in Scotland; in the little town where the man went in the school and shot at all the children. But like prisons in the United States these days, where the crowds waiting to get in the front door force the early release of those waiting at the exit door, we will have forgotten about Littleton by next week because of some new, still more shocking, still more hideous event ... just as none of the commentators this past week made any mention of Scotland in their reports. I suppose they have all forgotten about it. In the past year we have had several church arsons, abortion clinic bombings, an innocent young man in Wyoming viciously beaten to death because he was different than the other guys, and now this latest thing. What *is* happening in America? Saturday morning the Jehovah Witness people came around. I refuse to be rude to them. I stood there talking to them for awhile. I think they mean well, but are very misguided. So they stood there witnessing to me, while I witnessed to them. I asked them why, according to their understanding of the Scriptures, are we are getting the almost constant emotional pounding we have been taking the past couple years. One said it was because we are living in 'the End Times' ... I had to excuse myself to get ready to go to the library, but I told the man, don't let the why-too-kay millenium bug bite you on the ass on your way to heaven or wherever. And a good time was had by all. ================================= So, now after the massacre at Columbine, school administrators are thinking cell phones in school are not such a bad thing after all. Thanks for reading this! Patrick Townson ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 19:39:00 -0700 From: Arthur Ross Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Not a Thing for the House of God Ed Kummel wrote: (a couple hundred lines deleted) Pat - I agree with the "turn off your phone in the theater/symphony" view, based on simple etiquette. But much of the remainder of what this guy says is utter nonsense. Cellular phones DO wake up and transmit occasionally for the purpose of making their presence known so calls can be delivered to the right geographical neighborhood (paging). This is called registration. It has nothing whatsoever to do with controlling the transmitter power. That IS done, but only when you're talking, or, to be more precise, when the phone is "on a traffic channel." The business about the battery lasting longer if you put the phone in a microwave might be true, but not because of transmitting but rather RECEIVING. There is no point to trying to monitor a paging channel if there is no system signal to listen to. Receiving costs battery power too! The seatback phone systems are specifically designed and, I would hope, tested for mutual non-interference with A/C systems. They are indeed completely different than the cellular and PCS service (and, I have always observed, exhorbitantly expensive!). As to "stepped power increase" causing harmonic distortion products, that too is nonsense. Intermodulation and nonlinear distortion products ARE the potential hazard in A/C, but the power control steps are largely unrelated to it. I have no idea what might be behind the statement "The power disapates [sic] 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!" Maxwell's equations are linear. Given a particular impinging field pattern, the amount penetrating is proportional to the incident flux level. Where the "easier" notion comes from is a mystery to me. And, BTW, the wavelengths of the cellular and PCS services are short enough, i.e. smaller than the size of the windows, that they penetrate the interior of A/C very well. If you ingore the rote orders of the crew about not using your phone and go ahead and do it anyway (on the ground, that is), you will find, as a general rule, that it works fine, assuming the local carrier has adequate coverage of the neighborhood of the airport. Cellular runs in the band 824-894 MHz, making the wavelength about 35 cm. PCS runs in the band 1850-1990 MHz, making the wavelength about 15 cm. EM radiation will penetrate conducting structures well if the openings are larger than the wavelength, as a general rule. Everyday example: FM broadcast signals can often be heard through tunnels, while AM cannot. The wavelength of the former is about 3 meters, while the latter is about 100 times greater or 0.3 km. The short wavelength propagates freely, more or less, in the tunnel, while the longer wavelength sees it as a waveguide below cutoff. I have had conversations about this with some pilots. There seems to be a belief that there is some potential for non-obvious problems, like interference with braking systems when taxiing. I'm inclined to not believe that, as the transmit power from the hand-held portable phones is limited to about 1/4 Watt, which is pretty small. But given the general level of concern about passenger safety under all circumstances, I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. Using them in the air is a) NOT a good idea, for precisely the reasons that the airline worry about -- interference with radio aides to navigation and communication, and b) in most cases would not work because of very high Doppler shifts, for which the equipment is not designed, and c) the altitude will make, generally, a very large number of cells "visible," causing untold levels of confusion among the devices attempting to talk to one another. Although most people probably don't realize it, cellular DOES NOT WORK in a true free space propagation environment due to excessive interference levels. It is the ugly, non-free-space propagation that prevails in the ground clutter that makes it viable, believe it or not. Putting one of the stations at very high altitude puts you into the free space regime, pretty much, getting back to the "seeing too many cells" situation. Getting back to the original topic, you might be interested to know that the Euros are considering a modification of the GSM air interface standard that will prevent, via messaging, the phones from operating in certain areas such as theaters and concert halls because of just this problem. Doing this by overt jamming is most definitely unwise, to say nothing of flat-out illegal, if that is what this purported product does. Federal regulations govern what can be transmitted in what spectral bands, and at what power level. Deliberate jamming of an otherwise permitted service has NEVER, to my knowledge, been permitted, at least not in the United States. Best regards, Dr. Arthur Ross 2325 East Orangewood Avenue Phoenix, AZ 85020-4730 Phone: 602-371-9708 Fax : 602-336-7074 ------------------------------ From: fgoldstein@wn.DOnotSPAM.net (Fred R. Goldstein) Subject: Re: Local Calls Being Billed as Intra-LATA Through IXC Date: 25 Apr 1999 01:51:36 GMT Organization: CENTnet In article , Wlevant@aol.com says: > 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. > Again. I double checked myself -- the prefix code updates are available from trainfo.com -- and indeed, those prefix codes are in PHSZ 30 and 31, while 275 is in 30. The CLEC is Worldcom (ex-MFS). It's worth checking, though, because AOL and other ISPs sometimes get the place names wrong. Worldcom's UUNET provides rent-a-modem service to lots of ISPs, including AOL, and they have a bunch of errors. The caller is responsible, and it's not easy to find out what's really where -- ILEC phone books often don't list CLEC prefix codes, and they proliferate too fast for phone books anyway. But in this case, Bell just mistakenly treated the new local code as toll and misbilled. Not the first time, not the last. Fred R. Goldstein k1io fgoldstein"at" wn.net These are my own opinions. You expect anyone else to agree? ------------------------------ From: Joshua M. Thompson Subject: Re: Local Calls Being Billed as Intra-LATA Through IXC Date: 25 Apr 1999 01:47:29 GMT Organization: Posted via RemarQ, http://www.remarq.com rugeeky2? wrote: > The Michigan Public Service Commission just recently fined Century > Telephone for what would appear to be a similar problem. Customer was > dialing an ISP in an exchange that was supposedly (I say that because > I don't know the details) a local call per tariff. Century charged > Intralata toll rates. Customer filed complaint, Century ordered to > pay fine. At least one of our customers was involved in that lawsuit. I'm a bit hazy on the details too but I believe that the end result was the MPSC ruling that CLECs could not bill toll or long distance rates to NPA-NXXs owned by other LECs if both the source and destination NPA-NXX are in the same rate center. (Century was arguing that it did not have local calling agreements with the other LEC in the area and thus was not going to make the calls local.) Century has a history of pulling stunts like this, I seem to recall that in another area of Michigan thehy started changing the tariffs (ie, making what used to be local calls into long distance) without telling customers. The customers basically found out when they got their bill. We got lots of tech support calls from that one too. Network Administrator | FABRICATI DIEM, PVNC. mich.com, Inc. | -- The motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch 248-442-1000 x212 | (Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!) ------------------------------ From: lwinson@bbs.cpcn.com (L. Winson) Subject: Re: Lawsuit Says MCI 'Redlines' Date: 25 Apr 1999 02:06:56 GMT Organization: The PACSIBM SIG BBS > [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. Plus, it would seem to me that a card reader public phone is a lot cheaper to build than the traditional coin acceptor with the associated armor plate and mechanisms (and the need for someone to pick up the coins). Do they even have non-coin public phones anymore in airports and train stations? I don't recall seeing any lately. And after all, one needs a bank card to get cash or a transit card to ride the bus or train. > Why aren't cash machines in those areas victimized by more fraud? There are some fraud attempts, bank naturally try to keep those things quiet. Some thieves have gone to very great lengths to _physically_ steal an entire cash machine from a bank or convenience store using heavy equipment (like a fork-lift truck or backhoe.) Holdups of users while at or just after using a cash machine are a problem. There was one interesting fraud case. Thieves set up a phony cash machine in a public location (a mall IIRC). It had a working mag card reader. When customers put in their card for a withdrawal, the transaction was rejected, but the phony machine recorded what was on the card and the customers' PIN. A few days later the thieves removed the fake cash machine. They then took the information gathered and made withdrawals from the accounts. ------------------------------ Date: 24 Apr 1999 23:24:44 -0400 From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: The NANP Has 8+ Years to Go Says NANPA Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > 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? Of course it won't be the solution. There are plenty of unused ten digit phone numbers. Unfortunately, insane amounts of them are locked up in 10,000 number blocks that CLECs have reserved so every CLEC has a prefix in every rate center in which they might ever offer service. (I don't blame the CLECs for this, the way the system is set up, a CLEC puts itself at a significant disadvantage if it doesn't hoard numbers like this.) The solution is number pooling and accelerated local number portability. Once you have true LNP, you no longer need a prefix per carrier, and the CLECs can give back all those hoarded prefixes. Indeed, the faster LNP arrives, the better since it's easier to give back a prefix that's completely unused than one where they've started to issue numbers in it. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ From: rtucker+from+199904@katan.ttgcitn.com (Ryan Tucker) Subject: Re: Sprint PCS Loses Too ... Date: 25 Apr 1999 03:30:42 GMT Organization: TTGCITN Communications, Des Moines IA and Rochester NY Reply-To: rtucker+replyto+199904@katan.ttgcitn.com In , Ed Kummel spewed: > My main problem with US PCS digital services is the familiar "robot" > voice as you leave coverage. Also, the absolute lack of data on some > networks (western wireless anyone?) and their incompatibility Obviously, you're not talking about VoiceStream (which is owned by WW) ... data is alive and well. Slightly pricey for casual users (at $30, flat rate), but it works. IS-95 (aka CDMA) is the only other digital wireless system commonly deployed in North America that supports data. However, try asking Sprint PCS (the major IS-95 carrier) ... However, on May 5, Frontier (B-side 800MHz carrier in Rochester NY) will be launching data (as well as the Nokia 6185). We'll see. > It seems that the digital networks that are prevalent > (Powertel, Sprint, AT&T, Pactel, Western Wireless) is looking more and > more like the way the analog cellular system was 5-8 years ago. (no > roaming between carriers, and if so, no calls could be received...we > still have the problem of no international dialing on analog systems). Bah, GSM roaming beats anything AMPS any day. Data is still rather fragmented within North America, but for voice calls and incoming/outgoing SMS, it's fine. 'course, then there's the big coverage holes (namely, Rochester NY). Chicago shouldn't be a problem much longer, and that's the only other one that annoys me (being between Des Moines [home] and Rochester [where I live]). And, of course, by the time this post hits the Digest, the entire industry may be completely changed. Such is the wireless industry. :-) Ryan Tucker http://www.ttgcitn.com/~rtucker/ President, TTGCITN Communications Box 92425, Rochester NY 14692-0425 Please keep public threads public -- e-mail responses will be ignored. ------------------------------ From: Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 20:20:15 EDT Subject: Re: Local Calls Billed by IXC -- FIXED, it Seems ! Reply-To: Wlevant@aol.com Well, here's the latest. BA did indeed call me back today. Not an engineer, but a somewhat higher-level customer-service person. Said " ... it could be a translations problem ... HEY, how do you know about translations ?" She then called translations, and called me back. Sez it's fixed, and gave me a $20.00 credit for my trouble, since BA can't charge back calls to an IXC unless they bill through BA (and Worldcom, at least in my case, doesn't). That should fairly well offset the toll charges in question. I can't verify the fix, but I *can* now reach my cell phone with 10 digits; that didn't used to work, either, until I told them about it this morning. All in all, BA gets 10 out of a possible 10 on this one. Unless the problem persists. Bill ------------------------------ Reply-To: Monty Solomon From: Monty Solomon Subject: Hearing on Viruses Becomes Debate on Privacy Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 13:54:57 -0400 By JERI CLAUSING WASHINGTON - A congressional hearing called to explore potential solutions to computer viruses like the fast-spreading Melissa strain on Thursday turned into a debate about online privacy and the investigative methods used to track the computer programmer accused of writing it. "While I am a little bit concerned about the pernicious effect of viruses, I am more than a little bit disquieted about the way this investigation was pursued," Representative Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat, said during the two-hour hearing of the House Science Committee's technology subcommittee. http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/04/cyber/articles/16virus.html ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 07:41:35 -0700 From: Rich Andrews Subject: CA Legislation Info Wanted Hello, Can you point me to California legislation on Unbundled Services/CLECs? Thank-you, Rich Andrews 650-604-6519 ------------------------------ From: Derek Sekala Subject: Please, Help Date: Sat, 24 Apr 1999 20:47:41 +0200 Hello Patrick. How are you? My name is Derek Sekala and I'm Polish. I'm student and I write my diploma of my Bachelor Degree. I was serfing in internet and looking for informations to my diploma so I found your WWW. I need informations about telecomunication especially phone banking (history of home banking ) Do you know any web sides where I can find information about this? It's very important for me. I'll become your slave ( smile ) if you'll help me. This is my e-mail: dsekala@polbox.com See Ya P.S. Sorry for my mistakes I don't know English fluently. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Does anyone need a new slave? I do not need one presently. Perhaps someone with familiarity on the subject of phone banking can help Derek. I have no need to go to the bank that often the bank ... hmmm ... ... well, let's see ... I had the sermon earlier in this issue, so now it is time to pass the offering plate. Readers: if you have not yet made your annual contribution to the Digest for this year, would you please consider doing so at this time. Your financial support is very helpful in keeping the Digest and web site alive. The suggested donation is twenty dollars per reader/year, but you are the person to best decide what is appropriate. Your smallest gifts really do help a lot. To those of you who have already responded for this year, I extend my grateful thanks. Patrick Townson, PO Box 765, Junction City, KS 66441-0765 ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #57 *****************************