Piet van Oostrum <piet@cs.ruu.nl> (05/26/91)
This week the Dutch PTT Telecom announced the availability of call forwarding starting at June 1. It is the beginning of a collection of features to be announced in the near future (e.g. Call Waiting). In fact they offered Call forwarding already on a limited basis for a big charge. The charge now is Dfl 1.95 (about $1) for each enabling of the forwarding (i.e. when you forward your number to another number). You can forward to any number in the country, except the 06-series (which is the equivalent of 800 and 900 numbers in the USA). Per call you will pay the charges from your number to the forwarded number whereas the caller pays the charges from his/her number to yours. You can have the feature blocked free of charge. It is only available if you have a touch-tone phone. And of course it is not available if you are on a mechanical exchange (I read in the paper that this is still some 30% of the subscribers). It is not possible to forward to a forwarded number. The PTT Telecom has a monopoly here and they are rather conservative. I guess that is the reason that we had to wait so long. Piet* van Oostrum, Dept of Computer Science, Utrecht University, Padualaan 14, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands. Telephone: +31 30 531806 Uucp: uunet!mcsun!ruuinf!piet Telefax: +31 30 513791 Internet: piet@cs.ruu.nl (*`Pete')