Jack.Winslade@uunet.uu.net> (05/28/91)
YSAR1111@vm1.yorku.ca (Rick Broadhead) writes: > I've also noticed that busy signals and ringing signals can vary > WITHIN a country. For instance, in Canada and the United States, > these tones vary depending on the exchange dialed. ... And the Moderator Noted: > One sounds one way, another some other way. PAT] It's not only that they SOUND different, equipment that listens for the call progress tones BEHAVES differently as well. One particular prefix, 212-569 (this may have been upgraded in the last few months) still uses the older 'city ring', which has a different (lower) pitch but the same cadence as the modern 'standard' ringback tone. When my system used to dial a system on this office, it could not tell if there was a valid ring, a busy, or if the call was accidentally intercepted in Never Never Land. For example, if it called and found the system busy, it would not immediately abort and log a busy attempt, but it would wait for a timeout and log a failed session. Same for a ring with no answer. A minor inconvenience, but somewhat annoying. It's that older tone that many of us (yes, showing my age, I know) always learned as >>THE<< ringing tone when we first learned to use the phone. After I learned a bit about telephone hardware, I discovered that this tone (and it's accompanying tone, the rude, raucous busy tone -- a klaxon compared to the polite tweet-tweet of today's busy tone) was found mostly on the old panel and #1 crossbar systems, as well as some of the older #5 crossbars. These tones were generated by huge mechanical generators and used in the larger metropolitan offices. There was a discussion of ringing tones in a local conference a while back (but I can't find it now) which discussed this. It made mention of a certain suburban Omaha office which until recently had a vibrating reed tone generator. It was remarked that it sounded like the passing of gas. ;-) Good Day! JSW msged 1.99S ZTC * Origin: [200:5010/2@metronet] Interuniverse Gateway (200:5010/2)