tel@cdsdb1.att.com (02/21/91)
When I recently had my wink start outbound trunks installed (the ones I posted about with the answer supervision), I had an interesting problem. It seems I couldn't place long distance calls. The Phone Companies computer showed my PIC (Preferred Interexchange Carrier) ((That's what NJBell officially calls your 10xxx code) was 10288 (AT&T), and couldn't find any reason at all for the calls not to go through. I could place intra-lata calls with no problem. I couldn't even make 800 calls. If I tried a 0+ call to make a calling card call, the operator asked me what number I was calling FROM. I told her and she put the call through. I finally called the Operator to ask what line I was calling from, and she said her console showed "FAIL". I then got the suspicion that NJ Bell forgot to program in the ANI for the trunk group. I called them up and sure enough, they forgot it. They had a clerk punch in the ANI for the trunk group (All 16 trunks got the same number). Long distance calls still failed. I called the Operator again and she said "0547000" and got confused. What she should have read off was 9460547. It seems that the clerk forgot to enter the 946 in front of the 0547. Anyway, I called NJ Bell back and informed them of their blunder and requested that the set the ANI to one of my DID numbers, so that it had some meaning. 9460547 just rings forever. No problems any more and ANI reports my DID number. Interesting side note, the number doesn't show up on "Caller*ID" from these trunks, even though it does from other 946 numbers. It does report the ANI (the DID number I asked for) on the 800 ANI Demo line. Tom Lowe