johnk@uunet.uu.net (John Kennedy) (08/18/89)
The Arlington County, Va. cable company has just announced a new feature for pay-per-view. You dial 810-00xx, where xx is the premium channel you want to watch. It then responds with "verify your channel now" or "this phone number is not authorized for this service." It sure seems that they know who's calling. Does this mean that C&P has implemented Calling Party ID there, or do they have some other arrangement? John Kennedy johnk@opel.UUCP Second Source, Inc. Annapolis, MD [Moderator's Note: Actually John, *all telcos* have Calling Party ID for their own internal use; at least most of them do. They just don't *tell you* the operator sees your number on the CRT when handling your call, etc. Emergency 911 service is another example of Caller ID in action. And the telcos are required to pass your number (as well as your name and address) to any long distance carrier which handles a call for you. When dialing an 800 number (or some variant thereof, such as '950-xxxx', your number is passed to the organization paying for the call. It might well be that in your town, '810-xxxx' is an automatic reverse billing prefix and the cable company pays for all calls to those numbers, in which case they would indeed get your number. But services like that are not really what the Caller ID stink is all about. PT]