Theodore Lee <lee@tis.com> (12/08/89)
There is some kind of lesson in an annoying problem I just had with PC Pusuit that has taken Telenet a month and a half to resolve, although I'm not sure exactly what it is. But it does seem worth recording for posterity here. Our company's headquarters is in Maryland, in some sense midway between Baltimore and DC. We have arranged to be serviced by what I believe is called a "metro foreign exchange." It is in area 301, but dialable as a seven digit local (non-toll) call from metro (e.g, downtown) DC (area 202). For a good part of a year I have been using PC Pursuit's DCWAS outdial to connect to our computer. All of a sudden, in mid-October, my calls stopped going through. (The PC Pursuit dial command always returned Busy.) For some reason, whoever supplies Telenet with their telco information had, we eventually determined, made a mistake, and decided that our exchange was no longer a local call from metro DC, so calls to it were blocked by the outdial software. Tracking that down and convincing Telenet of the mistake is an interesting tale. At first, Telenet insisted it was a line problem: we have a Telebit Trailblazer on one of the lines; apparently the Telenet engineers had never heard its initial handshaking, which is not your ordinary 2400 baud Hayes, and decided our modem was bad or that there were local phone line problems. (It turns out that in fact we did have some C&P line problems at about this time, so at first I put the problem down to that.) Then they tried dialing from their Reston offices (area 703, not metro DC) -- and (of course?) they found it to be a toll call and reported that the exchange was not reachable. (We didn't realize until a little later that they were attempting to debug the problem from Reston rather than metro DC, where the outdial modem is.) About this point I was beginning to panic, having visions that the DC area toll structure had been redone without our knowing it. So I tried contacting C&P telephone to see what was up: my first call (to the service number for the exchange in question) shook me -- whoever I talked to said that the exchange was a Baltimore exchange, not a DC exchange. (At this point I should mention that I'm doing this from Minneapolis.) That didn't seem right (since I knew we had chosen that exchange specifically so that it would be a DC local call.) What I wanted to do then was find an operator in the exchange where the Telenet outdial was located and ask her whether the exchange I was trying to call was still a local call or not. It took me over an hour to find the right magic words to get my local long distance operator to talk to the DC local operator: there apparently is no way for a customer to be connected to a remote operator; my local operator kept telling me to talk to my long distance operator, my long distance operator kept telling me to talk to my local operator. After mumbling something about inbound service operator and stating my question, I finally did get my long distance operator to ask their operator the question, which was answered in one word, "Yes" (it is a local call.) Telenet wouldn't take my word for it and wouldn't make the same check themselves -- as far as I can tell, they had to wait for a new, updated (this time correct) exchange list. (To add insult to injury, somewhere in the middle of this process one of the Telenet service people decided the problem had been solved, when it hadn't, and closed out the first trouble ticket. And I almost don't want to mention, but will, that the engineers said it was poor beleagured David Purks' problem, whereas he said he was waiting for them to install the new, correct exchange lists.) To their credit, I do need to add that the Telenet customer service people I talked to really did seem to be trying to help and were as mystified by what was going on as I. The last time I was in DC I looked at a phone book and think I have a clue to what may have caused the problem: the exchange in question belongs to the town of Ashton (although our offices are not in Ashton). The boundary between the Baltimore LATA and the DC LATA goes right through the middle of Ashton, and I suspect if you look in some list somewhere you'll find Ashton as part of the Baltimore LATA, even though some of its exchanges are in the DC LATA and in fact local as well. Who says communications companies understand the business they're in? Ted Lee <lee@TIS.COM>
dave@aplpy.jhuapl.edu (David J. Buscher) (12/16/89)
It seems that the tangled tale may be more far flung. I live in Clarksville, MD between Balt and Wash. and am in Balt LATA. I have an FX line in Wash. It is a 596 exchange and I frequently call a 484 exchange in Wash. In Nov. my usual $30 phone bill went to $178 with a bunch of 484 calls to Pikesville (Balt) listed. I called the business office and after going round and round finally got the appropriate credit. Dec the same thing happened and C&P said the problem should now be fixed. Perhaps there is a relationship to the Ashton problem.