drears@pica.army.mil (Dennis G. Rears (FSAC)) (12/11/90)
I have been a subscriber to Sprint for about a year now. I am generally satisified with their service but I have been having trouble with some things. First, it takes so long to set up a call. On calls to Austrailia, It takes 40-60 seconds from the time the last digit is dial until the connection is actually made. On stateside calls maybe a full 10 seconds. Is this normal? Also about 30% of the calls to Austrailia, the quality is terrible; there is a terrible echo. Is this the fault of Sprint or Austrailia Telecom? On bad calls, I hang up immediatley and call the LD operator. She reconnects me and the sound is great. How can the Sprint LD operator connect me so fast but I can do it myself. On a unrelated note ... Is there anyway I can get the local phone company (NJ Bell) or anyone to give me a list of all the unassigned numbers for a particular prefix? I actually need such a list for three prefixes. Failing that is there a service where I can get the assigned number for a particular prefix. dennis
ndallen@contact.uucp (Nigel Allen) (12/14/90)
drears@pica.army.mil (Dennis G. Rears (FSAC)) complains that call set-up time on calls to Australia is too high. This may not be Sprint's fault. The local telephone exchange is probably causing some of the delay, because it only forwards the dialled number to Sprint once it is convinced that all the digits have been dialled. This is not a problem with North American calls, since U.S. and Canadian telephone numbers are all the same length, but for overseas calls, the local switch waits until a few seconds have elapsed since the last number was dialled (this is called waiting for "time-out"). However, the local switch will recognize the # character as meaning that you have finished dialling, and will forward the number to Sprint immediately on receiving the #, assuming that you have dialled a plausible number of digits. (In other words, 011-44-71-xxx-xxxx # will go through, but 011-44-71 # may be rejected by the local switch as being too short. I realize that the example is for a number in London, England, not Australia.) This is not specific to Sprint. It should work with any long distance carrier with overseas calling facilities (or, strictly speaking, it should work with any sufficiently modern local switch, since you're talking to the facilities of the local carrier, not to Sprint.)