david@dandelion.CI.COM (David Watson) (05/05/88)
Here in the Boston area, we have at least several 1-550- numbers which interconnect their callers, including "teen", "party", and "fantasy" lines. The cost is 20 cents for the first minute; 10 cents per minute thereafter. I'm not interested in participating in the controversy over the content available on some of these lines; this is probably the wrong group for that discussion anyway. I am, however, curious about how they work, and would like to hear from someone who has facts about the way they are implemented. When your call to one of these services succeeds, you hear a recorded message describing the rate structure and the purpose of the particular line. Then your call is assigned to one of a number of groups of about eight callers whose conversations are arbitrated by some gain control circuitry so that you generally hear only one person speak at once. There is sometimes a human "moderator" whose function is to check in on each conversation and bump any callers bothering the rest of the "cluster". A beep tone sounds every ten minutes. What's the history of these services? What is their official name? Did they suddenly spring into existence after the AT&T breakup? What is the nature of the arrangement between the providers of these services and the telephone companies? What percentage of the generated revenue do these businesses collect -- or are they phone-company operated in the first place? The number of eight-caller "clusters" seems to vary dynamically -- what determines the number of clusters? What technology is at the moderators' disposal? Can they re-assign a caller to a different cluster, for example? Are they responsible for enabling and disabling clusters? How do they keep track of the number of lines in use, and who is abusing them? What is the ratio of moderators to clusters? Is it a common arrangement that the 550 exchange in every area code is reserved for this type of service? How many of these services are there in, for example, New York? Chicago? Boston? How about rural areas? Is there an equivalent type of service accessible nationwide? Are there comprehensive lists of these services? Will ISDN (if it ever becomes prevalent in the home) drastically alter these capabilities, perhaps opening up new business opportunities? I apologize if these questions have been covered here before, but a good description of this class of phone service would be interesting. Pointers to articles would also be welcome. Thanks, -David Watson (david@dandelion.ci.com) Cognition, Inc. Billerica, MA
johnl@think.UUCP (John R. Levine) (05/09/88)
In article <8805042117.AA21998@dandelion.CI.COM> david@dandelion.CI.COM (David Watson) writes: >Here in the Boston area, we have at least several 1-550- numbers which >interconnect their callers, including "teen", "party", and "fantasy" >lines. ... Here in Massachusetts, at least, the 550 prefix is an actual prefix which happens to be in the Bent Street CO in Cambridge. (I found out about this because that CO serves only a small part of Cambridge, and the building where I worked happened to be there.) The service provider orders 550 lines which cost the same as any normal business line and are electrically the same as well. The provider gets part of the cost paid by the subscriber, on the order of 5 cents/minute. It's up to the provider to arrange for the conference bridges, moderators, and all of the other stuff they need. The phone company only brings in the phone pairs and acts as the billing agent. I never learned where the hardware comes from. Some friends were trying with limited success to make a bridge on the cheap from a bunch of modified answering machines, but it never amounted to anything. -- John R. Levine, IECC, PO Box 349, Cambridge MA 02238-0349, +1 617 492 3869 { ihnp4 | decvax | cbosgd | harvard | yale }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.something Rome fell, Babylon fell, Scarsdale will have its turn. -G. B. Shaw