crandell@ut-sally.UUCP (Jim Crandell) (11/01/83)
> ... does the East Bay (of San Francisco) have a new system > that can adjust the ringer for any equipment within reason? what does this > do to their ability to notice modems? on the one hand, not telling > them that you dont have a phone connected removes vital info from their > hands. on the other hand maybe the self-adjusting phone trunks can > detect modem ringers? Bell SOP no longer requires registration and RE numbers, as I too discovered earlier this year when I traded in my Bell set and replaced it with a ten-year-old Stromberg 2500D (which was culled from a junkyard and works better than the three-year-old Bell set ever did). The ESS offices, at least, seem to be able to handle quite a range of ringer current loads, and the company claims to be able to gauge the ringer load on the line fairly accurately. However, although I'm not familiar with the method used for such measurements (I need to research that when I have time), I can tell you that I'm not very impressed by it. A few months ago, I lost about three weeks of phone service when the tip conductor opened up somewhere between the central office and my dropline. The explanation for the lengthiness of the outage could easily occupy several paragraphs, but suffice it to say that I had numerous conversations with Repair Service dispatchers and various people in the business office in the interim. For the last two weeks of the ordeal, the open reduced to a noisy inter- mittant. This brought about an interesting mode of operation -- average loop current was high enough to hold the line, and remarkably, the C. O. DTMF decoder even worked (more or less) properly; it was just impossible to carry on a conversation. At this point, a service representative (who surely intended it as a kindness) decided I needed a break, and so rather than dispatching a repair truck when she was certain the trouble MUST be in my phone (it's a customer-owned set, you know, and they ALWAYS cause trouble) she "tested" it from her console as she spoke to me (on another line, obviously). Her testing revealed not only that the connection was solid [:-)] but also that I had THREE (count 'em, three!) sets plugged in. Oh well, what's 200% error, anyway? I guess the instrument's measurement tolerance is GMV (that's Guaranteed Minimum Value for all you non-hardware hackers). It seems likely that an instrument like that will "detect" as many nonexistant devices as anything else. The impasse was finally broken by the intervention of, of all things, the CWA strike. During the strike, you see, when all the flunky employees are out of the office, they reassign some white- collar types to hold down the fort. Consequently, on my last call to Repair Service, I got some engineer (I guess) who understood what I was telling him and faithfully wrote it all down. (By that time, I had traced the line as far back as I could without seriously endangering my health.) Voila! The following day, the lead was finally repaired. This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the kind of service for which the phone companies feel justified in charging us an extra fifty bucks a month! Feel like writing your Congressman? You have my blessing. -- Jim ({ihnp4,kpno,ut-ngp}!ut-sally!crandell or crandell@ut-sally.UUCP)