TELECOM Digest Thu, 10 Feb 94 06:15:00 CST Volume 14 : Issue 72 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Adbusters Article on Net.Commercialism Needs Input (Stanton McCandlish) Reply to Adbusters Article on Net.Commercialism (Barry Shein) Dispelling a Myth From the Past (Donald E. Kimberlin) Offer General Ledger to Beta Site (Ira Cohen) Is There a Cellular FAQ? (David I. Dalva) CLASS/Caller-ID/Bellcore/CCITT/ANSI Documents Sought (wynship@uscs.edu) 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. 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: mech@eff.org (Stanton McCandlish) Subject: Adbusters Article on Net.Commercialism Needs Your Input Date: 9 Feb 1994 17:59:41 -0600 Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway Reply-To: shell@sfu.ca [To forestall any questions, it should be noted that Adbusters and EFF see things in the same light (IMHO): we are for the *privatization* of the net, and for the development of a "data superhighway" that is a many-to-many medium of participation, not just a one-to-many broadcast paradigm nightmare of 500 tv channels with nothing on but "multimedia" sitcoms and "interactive" commericals. EFF, and presumably Adbusters, are not for the proverbial crass *commercialization* of the net -- if we are subjected to storms of e-junkmail and advertising, if corpora- tions control all content, and if "interactive" means only "press this button to make your purchase", then this is not a network, it is nothing but a giant commercial. EFF and Adbusters are not tied in any way, and this note is simply to clarify any misperceptions that may arise due to their identification with our mission in the following notice. EFF's position paper on NII development, the Open Platform Initiative, can be had from: ftp://ftp.eff.org/pub/EFF/Papers/OP/op2.0 S.McC. PS: I don't subscribe to Adbusters, and don't know a thing about their political slant if any. Rather than send tired political flames to Barry, or especially to me or the newsgroup/list, please reserve them for alt.flame or talk.politics.misc. Constructive criticism should go to Barry, nothing should go to me, I'm just passing this on neutrally, and have other things to do. Thanks.] Forwarded message: Date: Mon, 7 Feb 1994 15:02:41 -0800 From: Barry Shell Message-Id: <199402072302.AA16151@css.cs.sfu.ca> Subject: Adbusters campaign to temper net.commercialism I am a writer who has got the job from Adbusters Magazine to try and come up with some ideas for a petition campaign they want to run to draw out grassroots support to counter the plans of big business for the data-superhighway. Adbusters Quarterly is a publication dedicated to the "Battle For the Mental Environment". My article, CyberEncounters of the First Kind, in the current issue (Winter 94) attempts a kind of critique of the evangelical reports that are commonly found in the popular media describing the Internet. However, I and Adbusters would like to see the new medium go in the same direction that Mitch Kapor and the EFF also envision: toward a freer better democracy, a world of communication and liberation, etc. etc. We, like most, see the terrible awesome threat of big business and the takeover (or subsuming or replacing or whatever you want to call it) of the Net as a really frightening eventuality and would like to stop or divert this juggernaut before it's too late. But before we do anything, we wanted to check with you, who may have been at this game a lot longer to see if some formal or global action of this sort has already been started. Have you or anyone you know begun a formal campaign to kindle public awareness of the **ALTERNATIVE** to endless home-shopping networks and Rambo-Content 500 channels that is being promoted in the popular media? We rarely see anything about what really makes the net great: 1. It's Free (in many ways) 2. It's two way (we are all equally producers and consumers). We need a major, simple, all-media campaign to get this message across and Adbusters is prepared to start it, but we want to check what others are already doing. HERE are some of the ideas I cobbled together for the editors and publishers of Adbusters. I'd sure like to hear from people after you read this. Thanks. ...................... SOME CONCEPTS TO BE PART OF A NET AWARENESS CAMPAIGN FOR ADBUSTERS (Note: These are my ideas alone, so far, not necessarily anyone elses.) 1.a: Contrary to what "they" (meaning corporate commercial market forces) would have you believe, the Internet *is* free. The actual cost of the largest chunk of the Net -- the NSF Backbone -- is about $20 million per year (source: Stephen S. Wolff, the director of the Division of Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation). Divided by the 20,000,000 users of the net, this equals one dollar a person. I say this is equal to zero for all intents and purposes. Even if we are very conservative and say that we are off by a factor of 10, it works out to $10 per person per year -- also virtually nothing. Even if we are off by a factor of a hundred, it costs only $100/yr per person -- three to five times *less* than what users currently pay per year on services like CompuServe, AppleLink, and Genie. That backbone cost of $20 million is the cost of doing a big fast efficient nationwide switching network. Not surprisingly, commercial analogues of this network have sprung up in recent years and more are planned. Why? Because "they" realize how cheap it actually is to do -- and how profitable. 1.b: But the "freedom" of the Net goes a lot further than just its capital cost -- its "hardware". There is a *free software ethic* that prevails as well. I think that the following note, attached to every copy of Steve Christensen's 'SuperClock!' is indicative of that spirit. (SuperClock! is probably the most popular clock program for the Mac): SuperClock! is free, but I reserve all rights to it. Give it to your friends if you like. It may not be distributed commercially (public domain and shareware disks come to mind), however user's groups and on-line services may distribute it as long as any costs are for the service (i.e., connect time or media costs), AND that it's accompanied by this documentation. If you really feel an urge to send me something, don't. I do this for the fun of it. If the urge just won't go away, send a donation to the Stanford Children's Hospital instead since they're always happy to receive donations from people like you for software like this. Their address is: The Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford 725 Welch Road Palo Alto, California 94304 -------------------------- Steve Christensen is doing it for the fun of it. The original students that hacked the first Internet links in 1979 for the American military also did it for the fun of it. Before "hacker" was a bad word, they shared the ethic that software should be free. This generalized "freedom of information", freedom of thought, freedom of ideas is popular on the Internet and is alive and well. 1.c: There is yet another kind of freedom represented by the Internet: the distributed nature of the Net's control systems. There is no central control or authority. A type of freedom of expression prevails there unlike any other place on Earth. Somehow it is all self-regulating, I believe partly because of the first two freedoms mentioned. 2. One must ask, when considering the future of the data superhighway, "The Internet is growing exponentially while commercial services like Compuserve grow relatively slowly, so what is it that makes the Internet so popular?" I believe the answer to that question lies in the following three reasons: 2a. As stated above the Net is "free." 2b. The Net is a haven from commercialism. It was conceived as a commercial-free network to begin with and it has stayed that way. I put it to you: Where else on earth can you find a human social construct that is free from commercial market-driven values? Especially on the scale of the Internet. In short, people are turning to the Net in droves as a haven from the all-pervasive market-driven madness that is gripping this planet. The reason for this I believe is because the technology to run it is inherently cheap (as noted in point 1 above) NOT because it is a socialist government funded entity. Even if it was privately funded, it would be just as cheap, costing users somewhere around $10 or $20 per year each. Note: this is cheaper than any other form of mass communication. I couldn't believe this at first, so I checked it with Hal Varian, Professor of Finance, School of Business Admin, U. Mich. He has been studying net economics for years. His conclusions are that the increasingly inexpensive computer technology of which the net is composed is just so incredibly efficient, that costs are in fact minimal. Sure, bigger bandwidth and more users is going to cost more, but the price of the technology is also falling. We must not let ourselves be duped by big business, who want us to believe it will cost billions to implement the kind of superhighway that America needs. With ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and existing phone and cable lines, much can be done for very cheap. And even so, say the new infrastructure costs $2 billion. If you divide this by the current 20 million users (and growing by 1 million per month) you get only $100 per user. In other words, if each user paid only $8.34/mo for a year the whole thing would be paid for! 2c. The decentralized "anarchic-like" control stucture of the Net. A network of over a million machines, the Internet has no central control structure. Net activity and behavior is self-moderated for the most part. In fact, many cite this as a reason why the "Powers that be" can never "shut down" the Net. The Internet's highly distributed global web of cheap connections pays no attention to political boundaries. Some say that short of "turning off" the whole telephone system, there is no way of shutting down the Net or of taking it over. 3. The Internet is a two way street. Each user is free to lurk, or take, or give as much information as they please, (within certain generous guidlines to avoid network congestion). Part of the success of the decentralized "anarchic" control of the net is due to this two-way quality of net communications. 4. Though the corporate interests have designs on the net as the ultimate entertainment and information *delivery* system, (i.e. broadcast paradigm), the observed fact of the matter is that the main activity in cyberspace is person-to-person communication. Email is the heaviest used service. Netnews is a forum for discussion. MUSH's and MUD's are popular because you are interacting and communicating with other people. You're not watching a movie or playing a video game. You might be playing a game, but you're playing with *people*. The Net is a social thing, a people thing, perhaps a substitute for Real Life community activities that have essentially been stripped away by our market-oriented value system. (There's no easy money in community!) 5. Somehow one must characterize the extent to which Big Business is working in backrooms to either take over the Internet or to popularize and offer something much more expensive and without the ideals of the Internet (see above) that have made it so popular. 6. The Net encourages creative freedom and experimentation. The best network tools like Gopher and Veronica, or the World Wide Web were created in a spirit of experimentation and were offered to the community for free. This quality would probably be lost in a commer- cialized Data Superhighway. And that would be a big loss. That's it for now. Hope this generates some good debate. Barry shell@sfu.ca Stanton McCandlish * mech@eff.org * Electronic Frontier Found. OnlineActivist F O R M O R E I N F O, E - M A I L T O: I N F O @ E F F . O R G O P E N P L A T F O R M O N L I N E R I G H T S V I R T U A L C U L T U R E C R Y P T O [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I am certain this article *will* generate some good debate, and to get the discussion going, I am printing at this same time a response by Barry Shein. See the next article in this issue. PAT] ------------------------------ From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Subject: Reply to Adbusters Article Date: 9 Feb 1994 22:56:15 -0600 Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway > forces) would have you believe, the Internet *is* free. The actual > cost of the largest chunk of the Net -- the NSF Backbone -- is about > $20 million per year (source: Stephen S. Wolff, the director of the > Division of Networking and Communications Research and > Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation). That's false. I believe you got the $20M figure from Steve Wolff, but I doubt very much he said this consitutes the largest chunk of the net. Nor is it even remotely true. > Divided by the 20,000,000 users of the net, this equals one dollar a > person. Hence, you should have suspected your own figures. > Not surprisingly, commercial analogues of this network have sprung up > in recent years and more are planned. Why? Because "they" realize how > cheap it actually is to do -- and how profitable. Convenient backwards reasoning, but your assumptions are false. Most of these commercial nets, individually, are bigger than the NSF net backbone. The NSF net backbone is a particularly inexpensive (relatively) piece of the pie, primarily because they only service other network providers. It's also shrinking relative to the rest of the net as rapidly as the net is growing. The fastest growing segment of the US network is the commercial end-user sector, and they are technically not invited onto the NSFnet. So how are they all getting on? Probably the next fastest growing arena is Europe, and surely they're not benefiting directly from the US Nat'l Science Foundation network (indirectly, of course, but somehow they're getting their own act together, and it's certainly not with US Tax Dollars.) Note, for example, that the $20M/year figure doesn't even take into account the several academic regional providers such as NEARnet, BARRnet, OARnet, CERFnet, THEnet, SURAnet, CONCERTnet, etc. Let alone the purely commercial providers (Alternet, PSI, Sprint, etc.) Do you happen to have any figures or even statements from those who do this for a living as to what the margins are? > 2. One must ask, when considering the future of the data superhighway, > The Internet is growing exponentially while commercial services like > Compuserve grow relatively slowly, Then how do you explain, for example, the recent article in the {New York Times} reporting that America OnLine had to stop accepting new users last week because of explosive growth (they claim to have doubled their some hundred thousand user base in the past three months)? > 2a. As stated above the Net is "free." Really? Then what on earth is Software Tool & Die, a commercial Internet provider I happen to run, spending over $1M/year on (and this is our only business)? No one here has gotten rich from this, virtually every nickel goes to staff, overhead (rent, electricity etc) and investment in the services (computing systems, network equipment, etc.) > We must not let ourselves be duped by big business, who want us to > believe it will cost billions to implement the kind of superhighway > that America needs. With ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) and > existing phone and cable lines, much can be done for very cheap. And > even so, say the new infrastructure costs $2 billion. If you divide > this by the current 20 million users (and growing by one million per > month) you get only $100 per user. In other words, if each user paid > only $8.34/mo for a year the whole thing would be paid for! I'd say we'd be well off just not being duped by you. This is equivalent to saying that a phone line costs only $20/month so that's the cost of the internet. Gee, then how come your typical user has to have $2,000-$3,000 worth of PC, modem etc? You are making exactly this error in your above calculations. Yes, bare data lines are fairly inexpensive. Routers cost $15,000 or more each, etc. A T1 line alone is a very sorry thing to look at, it looks a lot like a piece of wire. And what about the staff to run it all? Do you think all this amazing stuff just works by itself? Hah! At every level are people sweating it out making it work. Even at a university where the network connection per se may be completely subsidized it is a mere bagatelle of the costs. Most sizeable computing centers would be happy to show you it costs them another few million per year (and even that rarely includes things like rent, electricity etc) to keep it all running. Taking that one more step, I envision you like a student at one of university sites convincing himself, gee, this stuff is all free! You have forgotten about your tuition ... Anyhow, this is all very naive. I advise you to look into the actual facts before forming such strong opinions. Even superficial examination shows your reasoning to be flawed. One more question: This note begins with a call for a petition. To whom will this petition be addressed? Is this a plan to request that the government be more involved in the information highway and its regulation? If so I request you present the petition to Jesse Helms. I am sure, as a representative of our government, he will be most interested in your suggestion that he utilize the government to take more control of this resource ... food for thought. > That's it for now. Hope this generates some good debate. Me too, but somehow I doubt it and suspect it will just become an exercise in "are you a believer or not?" and the facts will be discounted, some noise will be made, and nothing shall come of it other than having defused what might have been some useful energy resulting in a bunch of disillusioned people. You don't get too many shots to cry wolf, better make sure there's a wolf out there! Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@world.std.com | uunet!world!bzs Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 9 Feb 94 18:07 EST From: Donald E. Kimberlin <0004133373@mcimail.com> Subject: Dispelling a Myth From the Past In Digest v14 iss68, grout@sp17.csrd.uiuc.edu (John R. Grout), speaking to the matter of: "Are LATA Maps Available?" said: > Having grown up in Rochester, NY ... AT&T's monopoly on long distance > service and the cross-subsidization it allowed was draining money out > of our area to subsidize New York Telephone's local telephone rates > (so Rochester Telephone's local telephone rates were _far_ higher than > NY Tels before divestiture): that was simply _WRONG_. Rochester > Telephone consistently fought AT&T's monopoly, was on the winning side > (against AT&T) of the Carterfone decision in the late 1960's, and > divestiture finally corrected the gross injustice of cross-subsidy for > the benefit of another company's customers. Sorry, but the claim of cross-subsidy from AT&T monopoly long distance is not true. While the non-Bell LEC's have had plenty of reasons for hating "The Bell," as their historic pejorative called the "monopoly" unified Bell System, cross-subsidization of AT&T's local companies with profits from long distance service to Independent areas was _not_ one of them. That is some sort of myth that came from Independent company people many years ago, but could only have been true prior to the 1913 consent decree that brought AT&T's era as an unregulated "robber baron" to a halt. After the 1913 consent decree was signed, AT&T's long distance operation became a separate "department," but it was in fact a separate profit center that paid all its profits (which were, admittedly, significant) directly into the AT&T HQ treasury. The payments out of AT&T Long Lines to local phonecos, both Bell and Independent, were the same: A measly twenty-five cents each to the origin- ating and terminating local phonecos. AT&T Long Lines kept _all_ the rest, regardless of the total revenue from the call! For this twenty-five cents, the local companies were expected to provide operator services and all needed plant to interconnect to the Long Lines network. Not much subsidy there! Now, there was much variation due to locally negotiated arrangements, but the case was most often that the Independents did not interconnect directly to AT&T. Rather, they connected through the Bell LEC in their state. It was rare for AT&T to have an interconnection point directly in an Independent LEC. (Rochester Telephone may have been large enough to be an exception, but Peninsular of Florida, which is now million-plus line GTE of Florida actually had a Southern Bell toll testboard manned by Southern Bell people in downtown Tampa, with Southern Bell-owned toll facilities out to Orlando, 85 miles away.) So, the nearby Bell company often ate a lot of dollars giving an Independent connectivity to the outside world -- all for its measly quarter a call. The Independent might well be cheesed, seeing billing for calls of tens of dollars per call, but nothing getting through to them, but providing Long Distance connectivity and support was hardly Fat City for the Bell LECs, either. AND, after all this, the Bell LECs, by terms of their ancient "contracts" with AT&T (also for the most part, their major shareholder), had to pay AT&T a "royalty for Bell's patents" of one percent of gross revenue right off the top, PLUS a "management advisory fee" of three percent of gross revenue, AFTER which they were expected to make a "reasonable return on investment for their shareholders," which was primarily AT&T. In short, the Bell LECs were nothing but "tax farms" for their AT&T masters, for decades. Rest assured that the Bell LECs hated their AT&T masters as much as the Independent LECs did. I know, because I was there working for AT&T Long Lines, and getting the flak from both. This 1913-originated scheme began to crumble in the 1960's, when some Independents grew up enough to put enough pressure on the Bell LECs to make it so unattractive to connect them, that more and more Independent LECs began to get direct connectivity to AT&T's Long Lines. At that point, a new scheme, called "Division of Revenues" came into being. It was merely a means of paying out shares of the revenue proportionate to the investment and processing each participant had in a call. This was largely forced by the Independent LECs, who would in no way tolerate the measly quarter-per-call payback. especially when they had to make investments in new, modern electronic transmission plant in order to get to AT&T's Long Lines. AT&T subsidize its Bell LECs with money from LD traffic out of Independent territories, with the result of reducing rates for Bell LEC lines? Sorry, that's an old myth, and one we should put to rest. AT&T might have gotten the money, but they didn't give it back to any of their Bell LECs, no sirree ... they kept it! [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Don, I don't think your figures are quite correct. If what you say is true, then why did the local Bell telcos them- selves tout the subsidy arrangement? They seemed to like it okay, at least in their published literature and advertising campaigns, and the fact is, we know the local telcos *did* get quite wealthy over the years. They were not as poor as you seem to make them out to be as a result of the 'measly' 25 cents per call and all they had to do to earn it. Their 25 cents was a very small percentage of the revenue on long distance calls (call prices were disproportionatly higher in those days) of longer duration, but the majority of their expense came then as now in the first minute or so of the connection and on calls of only one or two minutes in length (very common; probably the najority of the traffic), 25 cents was a rather high percentage of the total charge. Didn't the telcos also receive a billing and collection fee from customer remittances on long distance calls as a separate thing, from money easily collected from customers? You talk about the 'measly 25 cents', but a quarter went a lot further in those days. Maybe some telcos were greedy and wanted more, but they did okay with what they got on the deal. PAT] ------------------------------ From: aseira@crash.cts.com (Ira Cohen) Subject: Offer General Ledger to Beta Site Organization: CTS Network Services (CTSNET/crash), San Diego, CA Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 22:45:13 GMT Need another corporate BETA SITE for a very robust, easy to use GENERAL LEDGER. 100% Oracle, V6, Forms 3.0, ReportWriter, PL/SQL. If your company's current GL leaves the users wanting, Or if your organization is considering creating a new GL -- consider the functionality and flexibility of this GL. It was designed to support the needs of demanding companies needing a sophisticated system. It does almost everything. Easily integrates with existing systems. Supports any CORPORATE STRUCTURE (companies, divisions, profit centers, departments, jobs, etc, etc). Each organization may be of a different percent of ownership, different calendar and different chart of accounts. REPORT organization's consolidated Income Statement and Balance Sheet in moments - detail or summary, see posted amounts verses consolidated amounts. Fast. Reporting database is specifically designed (summarized) to execute reports and statements without being a burden on computer resources. It's no longer a special request to produce a historic statement mid-month. And, creation of new reports and statements don't require that programmers have substantial accounting knowledge. Instinctively generates balancing entries for JOURNAL ENTRIES made to multiple organizations. Automatic reversal off accruals. Support for tax, elimination, recurring entries and cash flow. Quickly create BUDGETS using very intuitive and flexible tool; multi-version, 4-4-5, percent of increase, copy facility, etc. About the system's author: BS in Accounting('71), MS Computer Science('78) Member - Oracle Developer's Alliance, Oracle Consultant's Alliance 7 years accountant for CPA's & Fortune 500 (Consolidation specialist) 16 years accounting and manufacturing systems programmer/analyst/design leader. Past 7 years consultant/contractor to various large companies ($100 million to multi-billion) Designed & developed 4 GL's from scratch (Including Data General's General Ledger product offering) Enhanced/modified/converted greater than 10 GL's. This system applies many years of computer based accounting system knowledge. It provides the best attributes and none off the many pitfalls. For further information contact Internet: aseira@crash.cts.com Voice: 619-275-4972 ------------------------------ From: dave@tis.com (David I. Dalva) Subject: Is There a Cellular FAQ? Date: 9 Feb 1994 21:42:02 GMT Organization: Trusted Information Systems, Inc. Does anybody know of the existance of a FAQ that covers cellular telephony issues? Dave Dalva Trusted Information Systems, Inc. Glenwood, MD 21738 +1 301 854-6889 +1 301 854-5363 FAX ------------------------------ From: wynship@cats.ucsc.edu Subject: CLASS/Caller-ID/Bellcore/CCITT/ANSI Documents Sought Date: 9 Feb 1994 21:51:56 GMT Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz Dear readers of TELECOM Digest, I am an undergraduate in Computer & Information Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz. I am studying CLASS services and would appreciate it if anyone could direct me to the following documents: + Bellcore specs for CLASS services. + CCITT "Recommendations" regarding CCITT Common-Channel Signaling System No. 7. (Especially those relating to the above -- is caller-ID info. transmitted as part of a TUP or an ISUP? If the former, is it transmitted as part of an IAM or something else?) + ANSI specifications regarding Signaling System 7. Thank you for your time. Wynship ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V14 #72 *****************************