covert@covert.enet.dec.com (John R. Covert 10-Jul-1990 0800) (07/10/90)
John Higdon seems to think that No. 5 XBar is backwater, but here in New England, approximately 20% of the towns more than 20 miles from Boston are still served by Step-by-Step. Residents of these towns suffer from constant reorders and wrong numbers and lines too noisy to be used for data calls. The next town (or, often, parts of your own town) is almost always long distance. This is often true even when the two town centers are less than ten miles apart. Be glad XBar is the worst you have to suffer with. john
kenr@bbn.com (Ken Rossen) (07/13/90)
Time to come out of the closet. I live in the New England Telephone Backwater, in Central Massachusetts (toward the Quabbin, where the town centers are far apart, and the towns tend to be large) with a step-by-step switch. It's not necessarily all as bad as John (Covert) puts it, but certainly #5 crossbar is like science fiction by comparison. The lines aren't too noisy to be used for data calls, at least not all the time. I think there is only one town bordering Hubbardston (Phillipston, in the Athol exchange) that isn't a local call, but since nobody lives in Hubbardston on the only road that crosses the Phillipston town line, there aren't anomalies like next-door neighbors who must pay for a toll call between their houses. Maybe we're just lucky. I know other towns are worse. And there are advantages. You can call within town with only four digits. Actually, you can call within town with five or seven digits too. Or even nine digits, or eleven, etc. (since the first two digits constitute a NOOP -- 92-92-92-92-92-928-3345). There's the advantage of dialing someone within town, and getting to talk to someone completely different than whoever you dialed. Repeatedly. At no extra charge. You get to USE the "pulse-tone" switch on your phone, instead of letting it sit there an collect dust like you poor slobs in ESS exchanges. There are different ringing patterns in town, even different ones for the lines within my house, so I can usually tell if my call has hunted up to a subsequent line because someone's on the phone (takes a good ear, though). (And yes, even step switches have hunt groups!) Disadvantages: Forget ever trying to break through a busy signal with repeated dialling -- ten to twenty seconds just to dial the call! ... and since you can get a busy or reorder almost anywhere in the call if they switch gets confused (or doesn't have enough long-distance trunks, or trunks to Westminster), your continued pulses may hang the phone up (without you knowing it) and start dialling someplace else in the middle of the sequence. If you have one of those phones which depresses the volume while the pulses go, a good ear doesn't even help in this case. Pulse dialling in general sends all kinds of odd signals to the cheap phones I buy, causing one of my two-line phones to kick in the "Conference" feature in the middle of a phone call. When my modem interrupts someone else's conversation in the house they usually don't like it. No chance of pretending to be an old-timer in town -- only certain series of 100 numbers are assigned at a time. If you don't have a 33xx, 44xx, 48xx, you're a newcomer for sure. The best you can hope to do is pretend you've been there for years and years but wouldn't get a telephone 'til 1990 out of sheer yankee cussedness until you were sure they weren't just a passing fad. Oh well -- do we REALLY still think all this will go away by '92? KENR@BBN.COM