Ed_Greenberg@3mail.3com.com (01/22/91)
Well, not really, I'm back now :-) I spent a long weekend in Las Vegas for CES a week or so back, and thought I'd comment on the phone service, both coin and cellular that I encountered. Hotel Service: Ballys is charging $.50 for local, 800 and credit card calls. 9+10288+0+ works fine, although 9+0+ goes by a more "creative and profitable" method. Centel coin service: Centel is the local operating company, and they have very odd coin phones. I think they're Northern Telecom. They have a single slot and a tough plastic coating over the metal jacket of the phone. They take an abysmally long time to put up a calling card or local call, and to recover for the next one. They charge a quarter. I'm embarrassed to say that I don't remember whether I had to dial 10288 to get AT&T. It all runs together :-) COCOT service: Bally's, Caesar's and The Mirage all are completely COCOTted. The COCOT's look like Bell coin phones, rather than Centel ones, so they're easy to spot. All I tried do not permit 10xxx dialing, and route long distance calls via the "creative and profitable" method. You can't even get the Centel operator. None of them muted the TT pad after a local call was connected, allowing me to use the roamer port of the local Cellular carrier, which brings me to .... Cellular Service: I had a Mitsubishi transportable phone with me when I went to Vegas. My brother brought this, along with his Motorola portable, in order for us to keep in touch at the show. On arrival, his phone worked, including roaming, but my phone told me that "This phone is not authorized for use in Las Vegas." Centel (the B cellular carrier) told me that the phone did not appear on the authorized list. My assumption is that they couldn't authorize it through the database. A call to Pac*Tel Cellular in Sacramento on Thursday at 5:30 PM resulted in working service (and follow-me roaming) by Friday at 8:00 AM. Cellular coverage and capacity seemed excellent. The set I had has a signal strength meter, and strength rarely dropped below half scale (three out of six segments.) Full scale readings were obtained out of doors, even in "building canyons" and on upper floors, as would be expected. I drove out to the Hoover Dam, and lost cellular service about the time I passed Boulder City. One interesting point. It was not possible to dial from one roaming cellular phone to another. The result was a reorder (fast busy.) Calls were easily placed through the roamer port, so this was not a problem. Note that the roamer port returns supervision on answer, whether you complete (or even dial) a call or not. Centel does not provide *611 service after hours, so we never got a satisfactory answer to our question of why we couldn't call each other direct. CES was interesting, and there were some VERY SMALL handheld phones available. OKI and Panasonic come to mind. ed_greenberg@hq.3mail.3com.com