Steve Forrette <forrette@cory.berkeley.edu> (05/01/91)
I recently signed up for Call Accounting with US Sprint. It costs $5 per month per account, no matter how many lines you have on the account. After dialing 1+ inter-LATA calls, a tone prompts for a code. When you sign up, you can request a code length of two to five digits, and have it such that any code of the appropriate length works, or only certain ones, effectively giving you a PIN for long distance calls. I've had it for a few weeks now, and I really like it. I've always had problems with remembering which calls needed to get billed out to customers, and which were mine. This will more than pay for itself by ending the calls I was eating because I wasn't sure. I should have thought about this before I ordered it, but this setup has a strange interaction with call forwarding. Since Sprint doesn't know that a call from my number resulted from call forwarding, the original caller is prompted to enter an account code if I forward to an inter-LATA destination. Fortunately, call forwarding will remember a 10XXX code, so I can always use AT&T for call forwarding when I need to. Another interesting point is that the call accounting works even from my cellular phone. I have Cellular One of SF, presubsribed to US Sprint (a configuration that I know Mr. Higdon is envious of), and I get prompted for the account code. This implies that Sprint is getting the ANI indicating my cellphone's directory number in real time. Otherwise, their switch would have no way of knowing to prompt for the code. A call a few months ago to one of the MCI 800 numbers mentioned in the Digest that reads back the ANI revealed that the directory number was NOT given, but some shared, undialable number was indicated instead. So, apparently the Cellular One switch is configured much like many PBXs, in that inter-LATA calls go direct to the long distance carrier, probably over T1, and the calling phone's ANI is delivered as well. But for intra-LATA or 800 calls, regular (shared) lines to Pacific Bell are used, and the ANI delivered is meaningless. Steve Forrette, forrette@cory.berkeley.edu
Steve Elias <eli@cisco.com> (05/02/91)
forrette@cory.berkeley.edu (Steve Forrette) writes: > Fortunately, call forwarding will remember a 10xxx code, > so I can always use AT&T for call forwarding when I need to. I tried call forwarding (72#) to a 10xxx number back in framingham and natickham, mass last year. And it didn't work. What gives? Steve, are you talking about busy-call-forwarding or call-forwarding- no-answer or the manually controlled 72# kind? I've never asked the NYNEX business cats if it's possible to busy-call-fwd or call-fwd-no- answer to a 10xxx number, but it wasn't possible to do that using 72#. eli