david@uunet.uu.net (David E. A. Wilson) (09/26/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0377m08@vector.dallas.tx.us>, munnari!stcns3.stc.oz. au!dave@uunet.uu.net (Dave Horsfall) writes: > Indeed it is - it's used in Australia, along with ISD (International > Subscriber Dialling). There are very few manual exchanges left in the > country, incidentally. AXE is slowly replacing step-by-step and Xbar. Sorry Dave, but OTC changed ISD to IDD (International Direct Dialing) a couple of years ago. They also just dropped the rates - we can now ring the USA for A$1.19 off peak [how does this compare with US to Aust costs?]. We are not charged extra for touch tone lines - if you are on an AXE exchange you can use DTMF, if not, you can't. When I purchased a house that had never had a phone I enquired about getting a DTMF line and was told that because of the demand for lines on the AXE exchange (one out of six prefixes serving my area is AXE) that the only way to get a line on it was to sign up for Easycall (rather like StarNine). Telecom Australia charged me the following: Connection Fee A$225.00 (no existing line or handset) Exchange line A$ 11.65/month Easycall Services (1st 3) A$ 4.25/month Additional Easycall services A$ .53/month each With regard to area code splitting, I came across an interesting example in the Canberra telephone directory. Formerly, Canberra, Yass & Queanbeyan in the Australian Capital Territiory (ACT) used to have an area code of 062. Now Yass has been split off from Canberra with an area code of 06 and by prefixing all numbers in that area with a 2. What this gains, I have no idea. 062, 063, 064, 065, 066, 067, 068, 069 & 060 are all in use and no normal phone #'s start with 1. In an article from Australia (which has expired here) someone asked about data corruption which started 15 minutes into his call if he left his phone in parallel with the modem. I sent him a copy of the discussion which covered this topic in Australia earlier this year. For your interest, the problem is that Telecom Australia now supply push button phones with memories as standard equipment on new lines. These phones need about 9 volts across tip & ring to keep the memory intact. Most modems I have come across have an impedance low enough to pull this voltage down to 1 or 2 volts. After 15 minutes, the phone tries to recharge its memories and corrupts the data. The solution is either to unplug the phone first, or obtain a current sharing module to ensure that the voltage at the phone does not fall to low. David Wilson (david@wolfen.cc.uow.oz.au) Down Under.