Peter Marshall <peterm@rwing.uucp> (06/04/91)
From an article by Victor Toth in a recent issue of "STC Lines," entitled "Don't Give Up, You Can Never Tell What Will Turn the Telcos on": Believe it or not, "little guys" can still have an impact on shaping the network, or at least the services which it makes possible. The principal of a company known as Phone Spots, Inc., recently appeared before the IILC(an industry organization dominated by BOCs and formed to promote the deployment and use of...ONA features and services)to present his idea and solicit telco changes to the network that would make it work. Believe it or not, he got the BOCs real "hot" over his gimmick, and now they are falling all over themselves trying to come up with a network solution. Phone Spots holds a patent on the concept of directly accessing an originating client's transmission path during the audible ringing portion of a call during call set-up and delivering an audible message or signal to the caller between the ringing signals without delaying the call progress. Expressed in its more likely and intended context, this firm intends to launch a business of delivering ten second recorded advertising messages between ringing signals simultaneously on a potentially very large number of telephone lines. When offered in the residential market, it is contemplated that subscribers will receive a discount on their monthly bill for tolerating the ads. The technical obstacle that the BOCs have undertaken to resolve for Phone Spots is one of facilitating an interface at the end office which will permit bridging the mass announcement equipment across a very large number of lines... to permit detection ... yet guarantee electrical disconnection when conversation begins. It is ... curious, indeed, tonote how unusually responsive teh BOCs have been in nursing this idea all along. It will be just as interesting to see whether, after a year or two, the concept survives as a competitive vendor service, ot whether it finds its way into the central office as monopoly product.
dag@uunet.uu.net> (06/08/91)
In article <telecom11.428.3@eecs.nwu.edu> peterm@rwing.uucp (Peter Marshall) writes: > Phone Spots holds a patent on the concept of directly accessing an > originating client's transmission path during the audible ringing > portion of a call during call set-up and delivering an audible message > or signal to the caller between the ringing signals without delaying > the call progress. Expressed in its more likely and intended context, > this firm intends to launch a business of delivering ten second > recorded advertising messages between ringing signals simultaneously > on a potentially very large number of telephone lines. When offered > in the residential market, it is contemplated that subscribers will > receive a discount on their monthly bill for tolerating the ads. Ick!!! Next thing you know we'll be getting advertisements during calls to 911, people trying to hock "real Rolex" watches to us while we sit in an emergency room waiting for a doctor, lawyers sticking ads above the stretcher in ambulances, lord the opputunities are endless. I can just see calling 1-900-1RIP-OFF at $50 a second and getting ads for 1-900-GET-MUGGed while waiting for it to pickup. Actually, I don't see how this would work. There's a whole bunch of enduser equpiment and older, smaller switches that expect rings to be uniform. I'd get extremely agitated if my modem insisted that a line was busy because some dork was trying to sell me insurance between rings. Smart people word refuse to have the "service" on lines that are likely to receive modem calls, but what about switches at hotels and companies that do billing based on when someone answers by listening to the ring. I understand that newer switches don't do this and older switches also assume that someone answers after a certain time so they can deal with unusual rings, but it still seems like things would break in some cases. I'd bet that a few COCOTs would get confused as well ... hmm, this might not be a bad idea after all :-). Cheers, darren alex griffiths (415) 708-3294 dag@well.sf.ca.us