dcr0@gte.com (David Robbins) (11/09/89)
Last night's newspaper contained a piece of sheer obfuscation, misinformation, and outright lies that struck me as rather amusing. A significant number of SxS exchanges in our general area have been converted to ESS in the past year or two, and the phone company seems to engineer each ESS to accept from all subscribers, by default, both dial-pulse and DTMF signaling. But, as we well know, the phone companies still cling to the now-counterproductive notion that DTMF service must cost the customer more money. It is surely almost pure profit to them these days, but that's another issue that I'm not really discussing here. A reader from a town just recently converted to ESS wrote in to the newspaper's "help" column, asking why in the world would the phone company insist on the customer paying a service charge (somewhat more than $10) for the phone company to hook up a service *that is already hooked up*. Of course, the column asked a representative of the phone company to answer the question. I got a kick out his answer: >Although the towns in question may have gotten Touch Tone service, it >still requires addition of equipment at the telephone company to provide >the Touch Tone "beeps" to residents. The one-time ... charge is for >installation of the special equipment on each line, he said. Touch Tone >customers then pay per month for the right to beep in their numbers. I can't recall when I have seen a higher ratio of lies to sentences than in the above! And I noted that the response absolutely refused to acknowledge that what the customer said was true: that Touch Tone service is *already available to every customer for immediate use*. Reading the response, I get a picture of a little bottle full of "beeps" attached to the customer's line, and every time the customer pushes a button on the phone, one beep comes out of the bottle. No doubt the monthly charge is to refill the bottle. :-) I wonder when the state commissions that regulate the phone company's rates will wake up to the current realities of the cost of providing DTMF versus dial-pulse service? The phone company is really not 100% to blame for the current situation vis-a-vis Touch Tone charges, although I am sure that they will be more than happy to keep the public utilities commissions in the dark. Dave Robbins GTE Laboratories Incorporated drobbins@gte.com 40 Sylvan Rd. ...!harvard!bunny!drobbins Waltham, MA 02254