MYERSTON@KL.SRI.COM (HECTOR MYERSTON) (05/27/88)
This is a reply to various items in Volume 8 Issue 87 o (For Phil Damper re: "The Lady"). The lady in all of the old Bell System announcements is from Atlanta and has surfaced from time to time on talk shows etc. Apparently she is not exclusive as many other vendors such as Voice Mail companies use her as well. o (For Barry Nelson re: "Clicks"). It is not strange that calls from Italy to New York and San Francisco are priced the same since the reverse is also true!. We often find people routing calls over private facilities to get "closer" (ie routing Europe calls from the West Coast to NYC), the cost of International Calls is not dependent on where (in the US) it enters the system. o (For Will Martin re: Auto Answer). The feature works one-way only. You can >answer< the phone by yelling at it, you cannot >initiate< a call that way. Thus background noise etc is a problem only while the call is ringing. Panasonic has the feature on intercom calls on their KSUs and it works OK. o (For John Gruber re:V&H). Calls are priced by a system called CAMA, Centralized Automatic Message Accounting. Private lines are priced by Rate Elements one of which is the IOC or inter-office channel. V&H are used to figure IOC mileage in a straight-forward way (The square root of one tenth the sum of the differences squared). MTS calls, on the other hand, use a more complicated algorithm still based on the V&H but biased towards charging more proportionally for short distances. I am sure it is spelled out in the MTS tariff. I have it in Datapro Reports on Telecom but it is to complicated to detail here. If you can't find it locally let me now. (Report TC23-003-108). +Hector+ -------
hobbit@pyrite.rutgers.edu (*Hobbit*) (12/05/88)
I just caught up on the last month and a half, so this addresses a number of things. 976: I wasn't aware that the whole thing was *that* much of a fraud [I refer to the service-employed "keep it hot" people]. I've never been in favor of legislation protecting the citizen from himself, but this really *cries out* to have something done about it. They are making a mint by causing lonely, depressed people to eventually wind up more depressed, I'll warrant. Now, to the original poster of this info: Can you document this [aside from the ads in the paper]? Pat Townson sez: ... I found this wallet size card in the dumpster behind the IBM Plaza downtown. Obviously I did not find the machine to go with it! Hmm, out for a trashing run? Weren't various LOC officials up in arms about the high school kids finding all kinds of proprietary info in dumpsters behind business offices and such? Don't worry -- I routinely find discarded equipment and all kinds of useful flotsam that hotels or yuppie office complexes or even our own building simply tossed out. Don't forget, this is the "age of waste".. CLASS calling: They're starting to play with this in my area, offering the services associated with calling-number identification [call-last-back, trace-last-call, screen-given-number, etc] and of course along with this goes the show-me-calling-number service, which requires the outboard box with the display unit. My question: Where is the protocol for this thing given? There's no way I'm going to *buy* one. _H*