telecom@ucbvax.ARPA (08/23/85)
From: Moderator <Telecom-REQUEST@MIT-XX.ARPA>
TELECOM Digest Thursday, August 22, 1985 6:15PM
Volume 5, Issue 24
Today's Topics:
PC Pursuit
News on the telephone front
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 85 08:47:45 edt
From: Ken Mandelberg <km%emory.csnet-relay.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA>
Subject: PC Pursuit
GTE/TELENET is offering a new service called "PC Pursuit". It allows
unlimited 1200 baud modem calls between 12 major cities for a flat fee
of $25/month. The calls can on|y be made after 6PM or on weekends.
Currently the cities supported are: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas,
Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San
Francisco, and Washington DC.
Only the originator of the call has to be signed up with GTE, the
destination can be any answering modem in the 12 supported cities. The
$25/month buys the right to originate the calls from one fixed number.
GTE imposes this as follows: You call a local number, identify yourself
and make the destination request. GTE drops the line, calls the
destination, and when successful calls you back at your registered
number. They guarantee to call you back withing 30 seconds of carrier
at the destination.
GTE is marketing this to PC users who want to access out of town
databases. However, it strikes me that this service could cut
UUCP/mail/netnews and other phone based networking costs way down. The
service appears to be transparent to the destination, but clearly the
connection software would have to be hacked to accomodate GTE's call
origination scheme.
GTE will provide information about the service at 800-368-4215.
I have no connection with GTE, and the above exhausts my knowledge
of the service. I don't know, for example, if the data path provided
is really a full 8 bit path, or if there are timing issues that
would interfere with some protocols. I would guess they run their
own error correction for the long haul part of the circuit, and
the subscriber would only have to worry about errors on the local
circuits at the endpoints.
Ken Mandelberg
Emory University
Dept of Math and CS
Atlanta, Ga 30322
{akgua,sb1,gatech,decvax}!emory!km USENET
km@emory CSNET
km.emory@csnet-relay ARPANET
------------------------------
Date: Thursday, 22 August 1985 09:23-EDT
From: todd%bostonu.CSNET@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA (Todd Cooper)
NEWS FLASH!
AT&T announced in an expected decision that would be eliminating
24,000 positions. This would be mostly sales and clerical people.
It is not clear whether their staff in the computer division of
Information Systems would be affected.
In a non-related annoucement, New England Telephone (yet another NET)
would be changing the area code for Eastern Massechussets outside of
the Metropolitan Boston area. This change will take affect in 1989 and
the new area code is not known at this time. NET said that this year alone
they were opening 50 new Exchange numbers (3-digit) since 1982, and
"it expects to open up 26 in 1985 alone. With 640 office codes
[exchanges] in use now, the 617 area code has only 100 more prefixes
available, [Peter] Cronin [NET spokesman] said"
"Since 1982, phone companies have had to create new area codes in New York
(718), the Houston area (409), Los Angeles (805), and San Diego (619)
to meet increased demand for phone numbers.
"133 of the 152 area codes for the US, Canada, and connected parts of Mexico
are currently in use - up from 86 when the phone company created the codes
in 1947 to make long-distance calling for efficient, according Robert
Brillhart of Bell Comunications Research in Livingston, N.J."
Todd Cooper
------------------------------
End of TELECOM Digest
*********************