TELECOM Digest Tue, 4 Jan 94 02:14:00 CST Volume 14 : Issue 2 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Rate of Change (Stewart Fist) Caller ID in Pennsylvania (Jeffrey J. Carpenter) Wireless Transceiver Boards (Aninda Dasgupta) Post Cool Phone Numbers - Strange Recorded Info Services (Earl Vickers) Question About Ring Frequency (Jascha Franklin-Hodge) Connecting Two Phone Lines to One Phone Jack (Jeffrey L. Haynes) Questions About VOXSON 899 Mobile Phone (Yang Yu-shuang) US West's India Project Delayed by Foreign Investment Debate (A. Indiresan) Dialing 1 First Prohibited in Dallas (Linc Madison) Operator, Where Are My Car Keys? (Charles Hoequist, Jr.) 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 public service systems and networks including Compuserve and GEnie. Subscriptions are available at no charge to qualified organizations and individual readers. Write and tell us how you qualify: * telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu * The Digest is compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson Associates of Skokie, Illinois USA. We provide telecom consultation services and long distance resale services including calling cards and 800 numbers. To reach us: Post Office Box 1570, Chicago, IL 60690 or by phone at 708-329-0571 and fax at 708-329-0572. Email: ptownson@townson.com. ** Article submission address only: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu ** Our archives are located at lcs.mit.edu and are available by using anonymous ftp. The archives can also be accessed using our email information service. For a copy of a helpful file explaining how to use the information service, just ask. TELECOM Digest is gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup comp.dcom.telecom. It has no connection with the unmoderated Usenet newsgroup comp.dcom.telecom.tech whose mailing list "Telecom-Tech Digest" shares archives resources at lcs.mit.edu for the convenience of users. Please *DO NOT* cross post articles between the groups. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 03 Jan 94 23:18:27 EST From: Stewart Fist <100033.2145@CompuServe.COM> Subject: Rate of Change [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This semi-thread, a wee bit off-topic perhaps, was in progress as last year came to an end and it seems a very fitting way to begin the new year; thus I present as the first order of business in 1994 this essay from Stewart Fist. PAT] On 28 Dec 1993, H.A. Kippenhan Jr wrote: > It's probably safe to say that technology is advancing at a greater > than exponential rate. One of the things that is often overlooked is > that there are more scientists alive [and hopefully working - 8-)] > today than the total in mankind's history to date. It's no wonder > that things are changing so fast. > We want to be careful about 'run(ning) out of things to invent'. > There was a proposal just shortly after the Civil War to close the > U.S.Patent Office because everything that could possibly be invented > had been thought of. No criticism here (I assume that 'run(ning) out > of things to invent' was a -in-cheek remark). Without being critical, what's interesting in this string is that your correspondents find it curious and worthy of note, that our ancestors (stupidly) thought their old pace of change was extraordinary. We are being invited to snicker at this quaint and ridiculous idea. Everyone knows, that (by comparison with today) the pace of change of our ancestors was very slow and sedate? That's the sub-text here. But! Every generation thinks that it lives in THE period of most rapid change. Past generations always look slow by comparison because we look at THEIR change from OUR perspective. My guess is that we technologists view the world, distorted in this egoistic way, because our 'present' is always mid-stream in the technological changes that dominate our lives. And, since we egoists are obviously at the centre of the universe, ipso facto, these changes must appear extraordinary and revolutionary to the hoi polloi who don't understand things as well as we do. To our ancestors, these changes would be extraordinary! The distortion comes about because of our viewpoint. The problems and attitudes of the past always appear trivial to us -- because they are SOLVED. Relativity is such a simple and obvious concept -- why did it take an Einstein and X years to work it out? A smart high-school kid today could write a better explanation of relativity than Einstein in a week. And, similarly, we judge the rate of change selectively from our own perspective, having grown up with the 'solved' technologies which caused all the troubles in the past. And our judgement as to what is important is always a perspective from today's vantage point -- but people in the past found other aspects of change more important and difficult to handle -- things that are now trivial to us. This is where Tofler falls down in his "Future Shock" idea. I don't see any evidence that people today don't handle technological change reasonably well and easily. Ten years after Toffler warned us of technology's disruptive effects, Future Shock hasn't appeared in the way that was postulated. Today's technologies certainly aren't any more difficult for us to handle than those that gave 'Future Shock' to past generations (Crystal sets, for instance. Trams and buses for another) Morse-code telegraphy had ten times the impact of satellites. Telex has been a thousand times more important and more revolutionary than electronic mail. Computers and modern communications technologies might be revolutionary to the half-million technologists, but to the five billion users these chips and fibres are just creating marginal improvements on the adequate 'service facilities' they had before. Computers produce a very evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change to our culture when you compare them to the impact of something like the motor car. My mother was ten before she saw her first motor car, 18 before she saw an aeroplane, but she lived to fly the Concorde and see a man step on the moon. How does this pace of change compare with my life span, when cars, aeroplanes and space travel are reasonably commonplace? And the car I drive now is not really much different to the one I drove 30 years ago. The car has made very little 'revolutionary' impact on my life because I've always had one, and it has always worked at about the same speed and travelled the same miles. So I have reservations about all this philosophical "Future Shock" and "Information Society/Age" stuff -- I think it is tabloid sensationalism under the guise of a pseudo-academic cloak. I see little evidence that the 'perceived' pace of change in the community is faster now than it has been over the last hundred years. It seems to me that 'present' change has always been perceived as 'amazingly fast' -- it's a perspective illusion. If you were to identify the time in recent history where citizens faced most 'Future Shock' then it would have to be the 1890s and early 1900s. This was when Bell invented the telephone; Edison the light bulb and phonograph; photography and the movies became popular; Marconi and De Forrest created radio; and trams, buses, cars, trucks (and later aeroplanes) replaced the horse and carriage and bicycle. All of these technologies had a direct, disruptive and rapid effect on the way (and place) people lived, worked and played. It is hard to think of anything in the last twenty years with one-tenth the impact of the steam-train in the 1800s. In fact, if you stand back and look at the last century of technology with a dispassionate eye, then the computer and fibre revolution has been rather benign for the average citizen. Fibre optics just means better phone quality. And these days the technologists placed considerable emphasis on 'user-friendliness' and on the 'transparency' of most computer applications -- so a large part of the computer's power is directed at making it easy to assimilate, and easy to use. This didn't happen with technologies in the past - 'real men' learned to double de-clutch. Most computers are hidden, and work behind the scene. Technologists see these things and marvel, but the average Joe Bloggs in the streets just finds things easier to work, or with a few extra features. Few people are conscious when driving a modern car, that computers are controlling the ignition, brakes and radio-tuning. These 'revolutionary' technical changes are just technical trivia. How do you compare these things with the impact on people and cultures from the 'transport revolution' of the early 1900's: horses almost disappeared from the roads, and trams, trains and motor cars replaced them. Suddenly everyone could travel -- from suburbs to the city, between towns, and even between states. Families were no longer isolated by distance; people had access to all forms of entertainment and recreation, most of which had only previously been available to the rich with stables. And it all happened in about the same period of time that we have been dealing with the computer revolution -- about 20 years. I think we need to get our feet back on the ground and stop imagining that we are more important than we are. ================ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Mr. Fist, thanks very much for an excellent presentation of a point of view we often tend to overlook. If any readers want to present a rebuttal to Mr. Fist, or elaborate further on his comments, I'll be happy to carry the thread here for a bit longer. It makes a great topic to begin the new year. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Jan 1994 12:13:27 EST From: Jeffrey J. Carpenter Subject: Caller ID in Pennsylvania I received a copy of Pennsylvania Act 83 of 1993. This law permits Caller-ID in Pennsylvania as long as both per-line and per-call blocking are available. There may be a charge for per-line blocking, but not for per-call blocking. There are a number of parties that are excluded from charges for per-line blocking, including victims of domestic violence, women's shelters, and health and counseling centers. People ordering phone service may get per-line blocking at no charge within 60 days of ordering service. It permits a service that will automatically block calls from lines with blocking, and permits selective unblocking of lines with per-line blocking. There are a number of blocking exceptions for PBX's, 911 services and 800/900 services. Telephone companies offering this service must notify their customers sixty days in advance of the implementation to allow subscribers to obtain per-line blocking. jeff ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Jan 94 14:45:44 EST From: add@philabs.Philips.Com (Aninda Dasgupta) Subject: Wireless Transceiver Boards I want to design a wireless data network for indoor (office space) applications. I want to use as many off-the-shelf products as possible. The first item I need is a wireless transceiver. The requirements are: 1) should work around corners and through walls (a range of say three to four rooms/offices), 2) support a data rate anywhere from 10 to 64 Kbps, 3) should use carrier frequencies that are not restricted by the FCC and are unlikely to be very crowded by other systems, 4) should be priced around $10. I would like to get off-the-shelf boards to which I can hook up my micro-processor based systems to build wireless nodes on the network. Can anyone point me to manufacturers of transceiver boards? Requirement one means that I can't use infra-red. I should probably use RF. How about the 900 MHz systems? The FCC allows only a few tens of watts of power in the 900 MHz range. What frequencies do other such systems (e.g. Echelon) use and what power levels do they provide? Model airplanes and toy cars use RF remotes. So does the BOSE home audio remote controller. What freq. and power levels do these use? Any help or comments will be greatly appreciated. I will summarize if I get sufficient replies. Thanks in advance. Regards, Aninda DasGupta (add@philabs.philips.com) Ph:(914)945-6071 Fax:(914)945-6552 Philips Labs\n 345 Scarborough Rd\n Briarcliff Manor\n NY 10510 ------------------------------ From: earl@netcom.com (Earl Vickers) Subject: Post Cool Phone Numbers - Strange Recorded Info Services Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Date: Mon, 3 Jan 1994 03:04:48 GMT I'm putting together a list of phone numbers for bizarre recorded information services. I used to have lots of numbers like this, but they all seem to have disappeared. For example, there used to be one where you could leave whatever strange sound effects or messages you wanted, and they would periodically edit and splice them into their new outgoing greeting. And there used to be a number in San Francisco called the Earthquake Prevention Hotline, with a different oddball comedy bit every couple days. All I have to offer so far is They Might Be Giants's Dial-a-Song number, (718) 963-6962. And dialing 1073214049889664 gets you a computer voice that reads you your own phone number, in case you forgot or something. (This works from San Jose, CA, and I'm told it's toll free but I couldn't swear to it.) Please post or email any interesting numbers you may know of. (Obviously, please, no answering machines that might sometimes be answered by a human.) Thanks! Earl Vickers earl@netcom.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A couple of numbers I'll add to this list are 312-731-1100 and 312-731-1505. Both are operated by a fellow named Sherman Skolnick in Chicago who is a 'conspiracy buff'; you know, one of those people who believe that everyone but Oswald killed JFK. Both are five minute recordings, and he changes the two messages two or three times per week. PAT] ------------------------------ From: joeshmoe@world.std.com (Jascha Franklin-Hodge) Subject: Question About Ring Frequency Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Mon, 3 Jan 1994 05:45:09 GMT Can someone tell me the ring frequecies and durations of the standard US telephone ring? Thanks, joeshmoe@world.std.com Jascha Franklin-Hodge ------------------------------ From: jhaynes@austin.ibm.com (Jeffrey L. Haynes) Subject: Connecting Two Phone Lines to One Phone Jack Date: Mon, 03 Jan 1994 21:13:38 GMT Reply-To: jhaynes@austin.ibm.com Organization: AIX Defect Support I am trying to figure out how to wire two phone lines into a regular phone jack. Is this possible? I thought it was because only two wires are used. I have tried connecting the yellow and black to the red and green on the second line, but that doesn't seem to work. Anybody know anything about this stuff? Thanks, Jeff Haynes email: jhaynes@austin.ibm.com AIX Defect Support [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, I guess we know a few things about it Jeff. You do not want to connect the yellow and black wires to the red and green; that causes both lines to get shorted out. R/G is typically the first line (of two in a two pair cable) and Y/B is the second line. (I'm talking like an American now; forget about Europe or other countries for the purpose of this discussion.) You bring Y/B to your phone in the same way the R/G are brought there, but as *separate and distinct* things. You need a second phone instrument or at least a phone with two distinct lines on it in order to use the Y/B pair of wires, and that is presuming of course that telco has the wires connected at their end and in service. If you have two lines from telco, then what you do is at the modular connection box depends on the kind of phone(s) you are using. If you have a true two-line phone, then connect the four wires to the four screw terminals as indicated by the color markings for each. In addition you attach the four wires from the cover of the modular box to the associated screw terminals in the same way. Plug in your two line phone and it should work okay. If you are using two separate phones, we do it a bit differently. Inside the modular box, have the four wires connected as above, but from the Y/B terminals, run two little jumper wires to a second modular box you bought from Radio Shack or similar. Connect the jumper wires from the Y/B screws of the first box to the R/G screws in the new, second modular box. Now plug your second phone into your second box. The reason we wire the jumpers from Y/B in the one to R/G in the other is because R/G is traditionally known as the 'first line' and Y/B is traditionally known as the 'second line'. Most devices which handle only one phone line (i.e. a single-line phone instrument, an answering machine, a modem, etc) are wired internally to operate on the 'first line'; that is, to respond to and connect with R/G. So if you plan to use the 'second' (or Y/B) line for a modem or answering machine or fax machine, etc you need to give it whatever phone service you are going to have there on the 'first line' as far as it can tell, meaning see to it that the R/G on the newly installed modular terminal box gets the feed, ** but in a separate modular terminal box **. Never allow any of the four wires to touch each other. If more questions arise in this project, please write again. PAT] ------------------------------ From: yang@mundoe.maths.mu.OZ.AU (Yang Yu-shuang) Subject: Questions About VOXSON 899 Mobile Phone Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia Date: Tue, 4 Jan 1994 01:47:37 GMT Hi Net Friends, I bought a VOXSON CELLVOX 899 mobile phone recently. I have a few questions about it: (1) It comes with a 12 VDC 1000mA adaptor plug into the desktop charger. Is the adaptor just the ordinary AC-DC adaptor? Can I use the car cigarette lighter instead of the AC-DC adaptor? (2) I am thinking of making a small charger to be used in the car. What are the points to note? Can the battery be treated as the ordinary NiCad battery? (3) The battery has six metal pieces. Two of them are in contact with the phone which power the phone and four of them are in contact with the charger. The four in contact with the charger are labeled as "-", "S", "T", "+". What does those labels mean? (4) I noticed that the same type of phone in different shops carries different labels. For instance, the phones sold by Strathfield has a sticker saying "produced in Australia" while the ones in Myer has a sticker saying "made in Japan". The phone and the model number are the same otherwise. Are there any internal differences? Thank you in advance for any suggestions. YS (Sam) Yang yang@maths.mu.oz.au [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You can use any 'clean' (i.e. regulated) DC power supply rated at 10-13 volts and at least one amp, although my Micronta 13.8 VDC power supply is rated at three amps. Your car battery via the cigarette lighter will work fine. You don't need a charger in the car; just use a connector which fits the cigarette lighter on one end and your cellular phone battery charge connection on the other. As long as the motor is running your car battery will juice up the phone battery and let you use the phone as well. The plus and minus signs are for the positive and negative sides of the battery; most likely the S and T have to do with whether or not your phone is (or can be) wired into the circuitry of the car so that an incoming call will cause your horn to sound or your lights to flash if your car is parked somewhere and you are outside the car with the phone left in the vehicle turned on. Are you *certain* there are only two connections between the battery and the phone and not at least three or four of the six which reach the charger? It could also be that the S and T connections are like thermal switches -- when the battery gets fully juiced up it gets a little warm and some cellphone batteries use a thermal coupler to shut off the charger when the battery says it is no longer needed. There are probably no significant differences in the internals of your phone and those from Japan or Korea or Hong Kong or China or the local Radio Shack, etc. PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: US West's India Project Delayed by Foreign-Investment Debate Date: Mon, 03 Jan 1994 18:54:51 -0500 From: Atri Indiresan This report is from the India-D listserv group. I do not have the original citation for the article. Atri ------ US WEST'S PROJECT IN INDIA IS DELAYED BY DEBATE OF FOREIGN-INVESTMENT POLICY US West Inc.'s pioneering proposal to offer an alternative to India's state-owned phone system has been put on hold. The regional project, which would amount to a revolution in India's tightly controlled telecommunications industry, has run into opposition from some members of India's parliament and from unions representing workers in the state-owned network. US West proposes offering an alternative to the government-run network in parts of India's southern state of Tamil Nadu. Also on hold are 17 similar proposals lined up behind U S West's initiative, which received approval last month from the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. Technically, the project has been returned to the investment board for certain evaluations. However, a senior official has said that no clearance will be given until the government reaches a consensus on the role of private and foreign investment in the telecommunications industry. The unions say basic telecommunications services shouldn't be opened to competition. They have the support of some left-wing parliament members and are threatening to strike if there is a change in policy. However, a policy change is just what is needed, says Nagarajan Vittal, head of the Department of Telecommunications. He has been pushing for one since assuming his post in October. Now, his proposals are awaiting consideration by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and his cabinet. If the review goes as expected, a new policy is likely to be announced before the end of January. Mr. Vittal argues that there is no alternative to opening up basic services to competition. He dismisses as inadequate a 400 billion rupee ($12.85 billion) plan he inherited, which would increase the country's phone lines to 20 million in 200 from the current seven million. That plan would still leave a waiting list of two years, compared with today's five or six, he estimates. "We should target 1.2 trillion rupees ($38.54 billion) to bridge this perennial gap," Mr. Vittal says. India has less than one telephone per 1000 people. The global average is 10.5. Mr. Vittal wants India to have 20 million lines by the end of 1995. But because India lacks the resources to finance such expansion on its own, he wants to admit foreign investors. "I want India's telephone density to be at world levels and to provide telephones on demand," Mr. Vittal says. "The quality of services must go up, and that can only happen with competition." According to Boli Madappa, U S West's director of international network projects, the first stage of U S West's plan would create 430,000 lines with an investment of $90 million in and around the textile exporting town of Tirupur in Tamil Nadu. In the second stage, to be completed by 2004, the total investment would rise to $176 million and the number of lines to 930,000. U S West would provide basic telephone service, as well as data services, public call offices and cable television. Several companies seeking to enter the market are closely watching the outcome of the U S West proposal. According to Mr. Vittal, American Telephone & Telegraph Co. has offered to eliminate the waiting list in 71 towns by providing competitive services, and Motorola Inc. has offered a "waitlist-buster" proposal that, among other things, would be designed to clear the waiting list in New Delhi, India's capital, in six months. ------------------------------ From: lincmad@netcom.com (Linc Madison) Subject: Dialing 1 First Prohibited in Dallas Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Date: Mon, 03 Jan 1994 22:41:40 GMT Several people have written recently about ten-digit dialing schemes for local calls to adjacent area codes. The idea is to preserve the concept that any local call can be dialed without a '1' even if prefix shortages make it no longer possible to dial just the seven-digit number. In most cases, you are permitted, but not required, to dial the 1 anyway, and all telcos are recommended to allow 1 + NPA + number for all calls within the NANP, including local calls within the same NPA. I was recently in Dallas, where you *must* dial: 7-digit number local, same area code NPA + 7-digit number local, different area code 1 + NPA + 7-digit number all non-local calls If you dial, for example, 1-817-265-xxxx instead of 817-265-xxxx, you get an intercept recording telling you to dial again without the 1. If you dial 1-214-nxx-xxxx instead of nxx-xxxx for a local call, you get a similar intercept. There is some logic, at least, in saying that any call that incurs a toll must be dialed with the 1, and thus that any call that does not incur a toll *may* be dialed without the 1, but there is just no excuse whatsoever for *prohibiting* the 1 for local calls. I only tried this from GTE Southwest, not from Southwestern Bell, since my parents had to accept exile to be within commute distance of my father's new office location. It is possible that SWB does better on this point, as well as in every single other facet of telephone service. Linc Madison * Oakland, California * LincMad@Netcom.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Jan 1994 15:20:00 +0000 From: charles (c.a.) hoequist Subject: Operator, Where Are my Car Keys? Esteemed Editor, This is a followup to my posting concerning the new 411 service in Atlanta. In response to an e-mail request to post more details to the Digest about subscriber requests which don't exactly fit the telco's DA template, here is a selection. Bear in mind that the operator doesn't dare just brush off the subscriber. That may bring a complaint. But if the call takes too long, the operator's AWT (average work time -- the average duration of the calls at the operator's position) will go up, which is also evil. So everything has to be either solved or at least properly redirected, preferably in 20 seconds or less. First, there are some frequent errors, such as subscribers asking for DA in another area code. A subclass of of these are the telephony- challenged. The operators usually read out the entire sequence for the call to the subscriber ("Dial one, then , then ..") and in one case the subscriber obediently hit DTMF 1 ("ma'am?" "Yes?" "You have to hang up first.") Second, there are ambiguous or poorly-stated listing requests. These can be mildly humorous: "I'd like the number of X in Jefferson" "Which one, ma'am? I have two Jefferson listings for that name." "Well, it's the one on the main street." "Neither is listed as having Main Street as an address." "No, it's the main street, it runs right through the center of town." (pause) "Ma'am, I don't know the name of that street." "Hmm. Well, it's the one that turns into the state road a little out of town ..." This can go on and on. Others would get me fired for talking back to customers if I had to put up with them: "Well, that's what _I_ always call my bank, and _they_ always know what I'm talking about!" Then there are some which are telephony-related, but not DA calls, like the bozo who badgered the operator endlessly about whether he'd get charged for a DA call made from his cellular phone. Or requests for beeper numbers. Finally, there are the miscellaneous requests: - what time is it? Not, what is the number to get the time recording? The subscriber was very explicit. - when do the buses run? - what zipcode is ? - and the winner: "Could you tell me what research is going on at Emory University?" Charles Hoequist, Jr. | Internet: hoequist@bnr.ca BNR, Inc. | voice: 919-991-8642 PO Box 13478 | fax: 919-991-8008 Research Triangle Park NC 27709-3478 USA The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your telephone ninety degrees and try again. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Indeed, directory assistance operators (in fact, all telco operators) get a tremendous amount of abuse in a day's time. As Ms. Murphy, my former next-door neighbor and retired IBT operator once told me, "I thought something was wrong if I hadn't been cussed out by at least two or three subscribers before noon each day ...". Murphy was the very first union steward for the operators in Chicago over a half century ago; back in the days when 'everyone knew' no one would ever organize "the Bell" ... too big, too large, it just can't be done ... Murphy helped do it and after some forty years in the service of Ma Bell she retired in the early 1960's. She said to me she often missed the subscribers cursing at her all day long. :) PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V14 #2 ****************************