OLE@csli.stanford.edu (Ole J. Jacobsen) (10/21/89)
In the wake of the earthquake I have been having problems getting through to a friend in Ben Lomond near Santa Cruz. Dialling the number usually results in a fast busy. One trick I learned from the UK is to dial the number slowly with a rotary phone. Amazingly it seems to work here too. Perhaps the slow dialling results in a "pass on" to the next switch, the way the UK phone system was described here a while ago. I am not insisting that this is the case here, I honestly do not know, but what I report is true. Any explanations would be much appreciated, and I will always keep a rotary dial phone handy. Ole
john@zygot.ati.com (John Higdon) (10/22/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0466m02@vector.dallas.tx.us>, OLE@csli.stanford.edu (Ole J. Jacobsen) writes: > In the wake of the earthquake I have been having problems getting > through to a friend in Ben Lomond near Santa Cruz. Dialling the number > usually results in a fast busy. One trick I learned from the UK is to > dial the number slowly with a rotary phone. Amazingly it seems to work This might work *from* a SXS (which is what I believe Ben Lomond still is) but would have absolutely no effect from any crossbar or electronic office, digital or analog. Touch tone is converted to rotary pulses for a SXS office and it is remotely possible that things could be busy enough that vacant levels would be found only at the end of switch travel and the converter might not wait long enough whereas your slow dialing might. But when dialing into a SXS office from a common control office, you have absolutely no control over the pulse rate. If you were dialing from the metro Bay Area, you were using a common control office, there being no SXS left anywhere in the greater Bay Area. And if so, what you experienced was coincidence. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !