bnelson@BBNCCF.ARPA (Barry Nelson) (01/28/86)
I can relate to the mess in U.K. with payphones. The Italian payphones didn't give you any warning before your time was up so you had to stay ahead of it or lose your connection (which took several tries to get). While I was doing consulting in Italia it became obvious that the answer was NOT carrying around five kilos of their special 'gettoni' (copper slugs slotted for the fones). Sure, you could buy them at newsstands, if they were open. So I got into the habit of seeking out a friendly cafe/bar with a 'telefono a scatti'. Literally translated it means 'clicking phone'. It had a meter, which the manager would reset before each use, and another which presumably accumulated his monthly total. The user would dial the call himself and then, upon call acceptance, would hear clicks on the line. The period of these clicks varied with the distance to the callee - local calls: almost one per two minutes; intercontinental: several clicks per second. At the end of your call, or series of calls, the manager would look at the meter and charge you 150 liras for each click (or whatever the market would bear!). You then paid, or put it on your bar tab. One interesting thing about this method was that calls to New York cost about the same as calls to Hong Kong. I think the maximum rate the little machine could register was equivalent to seventy dollars an hour. (The office in Milan also got a single, huge monthly bill with no real way to determine who called where or when or for how long. There's a big Italian aftermarket in office Dialed Number Recorders.) You also have to 'request' an overseas connection when calling from certain areas of Italy. They call you back (in a couple of hours) when your line is ready to try making a call. Do we Americans take great phone service for granted? What would YOU do if you often had to wait ten to fifteen minutes to get a dial tone? 'This document contains opinions of the author which are not attributable to BBN Communications Corp. or to its management.' Barry C. Nelson Network Consultant / International Product Marketing