seanwilliams@attmail.com (03/29/91)
I'd just like to tell you all that I took the day off school yesterday to experience an "educational trip" <grin> to the United Telephone of PA headquarters in Carlisle yesterday. The Carlisle CO uses a Northern Telecom DMS 100. A technician showed me around the building, explaining the operation of various sections of the DMS. He told me that there wasn't really too much to see, since it was all self contained circuit boards. He was right. He then took me to another room, where the fiber optics are. He told me that the fibers led to long distance carriers and other area exchanges. I asked the man about United Telephone's MessageLine service (voicemail), and he directed me to a little box sitting on the floor. I looked at it, and noticed that it was faintly reminiscent of an IBM PC CPU sitting on its side, and it had a 5-1/4" disk drive, too. There were no labels on the machine indicating the manufacturer, however, and the technician wasn't sure. On the top of the machine was a 1200 BPS modem, which is used to program mailboxes (etc) from the business office. Beside the voicemail system was the DMS' report printer, spewing forth large amounts of seemingly useless information. I pointed at a particular listing and asked the man what it meant. He looked at it, then told me that it meant someone in (<blah-local town>) made a call to a number which was not in service. "What a waste of paper!" I thought, thinking of all the calls I have made to numbers which were not in service. Some days I just sit and randomly dial numbers to see where United allocates most of their customer numbers (I found that to be in the 3000s and 4000s after much experimentation. The 9000s are used mostly for payphones and distinctive ringing, and the 8000s in Marysville and Carlisle are used for voicemail.) I read in the DIGEST that the DMS 100 was capable of supporting CLASS features, so I asked the technician if United was going to offer it anytime soon. The technician told me that that was a sore spot among the employees, and he recommended that I not talk about it while at United. It seems that a heated debate has been going on for some time about CLASS, since it has been called an "invasion of privacy". Bell offers CLASS though, in most of its area exchanges. After I was done at Carlisle, I visited the Marysville CO. Since Marysville is a much smaller town, the CO was too. They have a DMS 10 (?). [I couldn't hear the man over the high-pitched sound of the fiber optics generator when he was telling me.] Marysville has the same small voicemail system, with the same type of modem. [You can call it if you want, my number's listed below. Maybe you can identify what type of system it is...] I thought it was interesting to note that ALL calls from one exchange to another via United are carried on fiber optics, even though the COs are located less than 10-15 miles from each other. I always thought that fiber was used primarily for long distance, but now know that United uses it for virtually all calls that are not made to a destination within the same exchange. I also thought that it was odd that calls from my Duncannon home to my Marysville job and voicemail are routed to Newport and then across to Carlisle Springs before returning to Marysville. [Making a big loop by going out around the mountains instead of following the highway to Marysville] This explains the short delay I've noticed when calling Marysville from my home. Calls to Newport and New Bloomfield always go through instantly. [See a map for more of an explanation.] After I got home, I wrote a thank you letter to the people who guided me on my tour, and I then wrote another note to the man who coordinated the whole thing, mentioning an interest in a summer job at United before I'm off to college. *** PS Rochester people: The United telephone crews who were helping Rochester Telephone repair their systems returned yesterday afternoon while I was in Carlisle. It has been three weeks since that storm, almost four, hasn't it? Rochester Telephone must have been hit hard! Sean E. Williams | attmail.com!seanwilliams 333 Prospect Avenue / PO Box 227 | seanwilliams@attmail.com Duncannon, PA 17020-0227 USA | voicemail: +1 717 957 8139