dgc@math.ucla.edu (07/16/89)
As J. Sol points out, new FX (foreign exchange) lines in the LA metropolitan no longer have flat rate service and their installation is VERY expensive. However, those of us who have had FX lines for years still have "grandfathered" flat-rate service and, moreover, with call-forwarding, can, in effect, use them for two calls simultaneously. I live in a suburban GTE exchange area from which the call to UCLA is a toll-call. However, an adjacent GTE exchange has flat-rate service both to my exchange and also to UCLA. I have a flat-rate FX line from that exchange (installed in 1974); the basic rate is about $54.00 per month -- mostly mileage charges. I have call-forwarding on that line to a local-exchange line, also in my home. This allows friends to call us without paying a toll charge at the SAME time I am using the line for an outgoing modem call. Actually, we have TWO local-exchange lines in the home, on a "rotary" and the FX line forwards to the first. I was most surprised to discover that if one of my rotary lines is idle while the FX line is forwarding one call to the other rotary line, and the FX line receives a second call, then the caller gets a busy signal. That is, even though the line being forwarded to is the first of a multi-line rotary, with idle lines, only one call at a time will be forwarded! A substitute for this FX line, which would be cheaper and is available without "grandfathering" but is more of a nuisance, would be to have one or two flat-rate ordinary lines in a friend's home in the adjacent exchange area. I could set one to always forward to my home and the second to always forward to UCLA (for modem calls). Varous devices sold by Comcor allow remote changing of forwarding numbers using various tricky strategies. dgc David G. Cantor Department of Mathematics University of California at Los Angeles Internet: dgc@math.ucla.edu