Telecom-Request%usc-eclc@brl-bmd.UUCP (Telecom-Request@usc-eclc) (01/07/84)
TELECOM Digest Thursday, 5 Jan 1984 Volume 4 : Issue 4 Today's Topics: Rate Comparisons UK Codes Phone CenteStores 800 number question inside wiring cost recovery British postal codes & phone prefixes welcome area 818 Intra-LATA competition Long Distance Service Various unrelated requests from holiday cogitation ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 3-Jan-84 14:35 PST From: Pam Bicknell <PAMV.TYM@OFFICE-2> Subject: Rate Comparisons I live in Sunnyvale, CA and most of my relatives live in Massachusetts - my telephone bills are therefore outrageous. Does anyone have references to written items or any online data regarding long distance rate comparison between Sprint/MCI/AT&T? I would VERY much appreciate the info. Pam Vittum (please send reply copy to: vittum@office) ------------------------------ Date: 3 Jan 1984 1846-EST From: John R. Covert <RSX-DEV at DEC-MARLBORO> Subject: UK Codes Carl Moore has pointed out that in the U.K., seven digit phone numbers are of the NXX form rather than the NNX form which was formerly a restriction in the U.S. The restriction in the U.S. was a result of the absence of letters on the 1 and 0 position of the dial, which happened because any letter on the 1 or zero could not have been used as the first character of an exchange name. "1" as a first digit was avoided because of the danger of a false pulse as an operator inserted a plug into a jack (I kid you not, I have read 1927 AT&T documentation stating this) and the reservation of zero as the code for reaching the operator. However, in the U.K., in order to avoid the confusion of 0 and O, the letter O was placed on the zero. Thus exchanges such as MOOrgate (they used a three letter scheme, rather than our scheme) were 600. New telephones in the U.K. no longer have letters. In London, no exchanges began with the letter O. In Paris, however, ODEon was a valid exchange, 033. Within France, 16 is the prefix used before the city code for national calls, and 19 before the country code for international calls. When international direct distance dialing was first introduced in the sixties, the lettering plans posed quite a problem. Germany had to publish all the exchanges in London and Paris in its dialling code booklet. Most countries use 0 for national and 00 for international, but the U.K. uses 010 for international, we use 01 or 011 depending on the type of call, Australia uses 0011, parts of Austria use 00 and other parts use 900, Denmark uses 009, El Salvador uses 0, Finland uses 990, Ireland uses 16, Japan uses 001, the Netherlands use 09, Norway uses 095, Lisbon uses 097, Qatar uses 0, Senegal uses 12, Singapore uses 005, South Africa uses 091, Spain uses 07 and Sweden uses 009. In France, a fixed length numbering scheme is used, as in the U.S., Belgium, Norway, Spain, Turkey. Exchanges in the U.S. knew which countries had which length numbers and needed not wait for the "#" or the four-second timeout for these countries. No 1 ESS only knew the minimum number of digits on countries with variable length codes, but No 2 ESS knew minimum and maximum. With the disconnection of AT&T and its overseas administration from the operating companies, an order went out making all countries variable length with the minimum ever used, 7 digits (starting counting at the first digit of the country code). ------------------------------ Date: 3 Jan 1984 1532-PST From: STERNLIGHT@USC-ECL Subject: Phone CenteStores Yes, something is going on with AT&T's phone center stores. The Pasadena, CA store was also closed on December 23 and the sign there refers people to the Glendale, CA store, about 5-10 miles away by freeway. --david-- ------------------------------ Date: Wed 4 Jan 84 04:03:53-PST From: David Roode <ROODE@SRI-NIC> Subject: 800 number question Location: EJ286 Phone: (415) 859-2774 Is the same 800 number ever used multiply for intrastate WATS in two different states (and for two different purposes)? ------- ------------------------------ Date: Wed 4 Jan 84 04:26:29-PST From: David Roode <ROODE@SRI-NIC> Subject: inside wiring cost recovery Location: EJ286 Phone: (415) 859-2774 In California, is the current billing surcharge that is supposed to recover customer plant costs over a 10 year period designed to mean that each consumer now owns his wiring? It might be double billing to levy this charge and also claim continued ownership of the wiring. All customers pay the same surcharge percentage, even if they have ordered service very recently and did their own wiring. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Jan 84 9:27:55 EST From: Carl Moore (VLD/VMB) <cmoore@brl-vld> Subject: British postal codes & phone prefixes In the U.S., the phone exchange will NOT NECESSARILY match the address required by postal service. It is no surprise, because phones and mail are handled by different organizations. What of countries where the postoffice does also handle the phones? (I believe UK is one of the latter.) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 4 Jan 84 10:10:56 EST From: cmoore@brl-vld Subject: welcome area 818 1st state to have a double-digit number of area codes: California! New 818 area, formed by splitting 213, is the 10th area code there. ------------------------------ Date: Wednesday, 4 Jan 1984 14:13:18-PST From: decwrl!rhea!donjon!goldstein@SU-Shasta Subject: Intra-LATA competition Actually, the BOCs don't have a monopoly on intra-LATA calls. They are only precluded from Inter-LATA toll (non-local) traffic. In Mass., for example, MCI has applied for both inter-LATA and intra-LATA permission to operate. ATTCOM has only asked for inter-LATA so far, but will if you want provide intra-LATA private lines. (NET, the BOC, is cheaper though.) They may join the intra-LATA competition if the state DPU permits. The divestiture didn't restrict AT&T from anything. It just left the BOCs out alone with restrictions on them. ------------------------------ Date: 4-Jan-84 16:05 PST From: MJM.TYM@OFFICE-2 Subject: Long Distance Service Have there been any recent comparison studies done for long distance services? SPRINT and MCI may be cheaper, but will the service be on par? Will AT&T become cheaper as competition grows? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 3 Jan 84 23:10:19 pst From: sun!gnu@Berkeley (John Gilmore) Subject: Various unrelated requests from holiday cogitation Subject: Wargames breakin techniques that work -- or don't I found it very interesting that of the 7 or 8 techniques the kid hero of "Wargames" used to break in to systems, only one of them doesn't work in the real world. Examples of ones that work: Finding passwords written down next to terminals Investigating peoples' backgrounds, kids, etc as potential passwords Using 'help' commands before login (got me onto the Arpanet years ago!) Scanning many phone numbers looking for interesting things The one that doesn't work is: making a free pay phone call by unscrewing the microphone cover and grounding it to the phone (!). [Even if it had the potential to work, the covers are glued on so nobody will steal the crummy microphone.] Somehow the movie scripters and producers believed that (1) nobody important would get upset if they showed good techniques for breaking into computers, and (2) somebody very important would get upset if they really showed a few ways of making free phone calls. Now where would they get an idea like that? --------- Subject: Telco defenses against scanning? While on the subject -- Does anyone know how the phone companies protect themselves and their customers against scanning? I'm sure that after being shown the example in a major movie, plenty of kiddies have written the 10-line Basic program to call a few thousand free local numbers and record whether their modem said "CONNECTED" or not. It could be detected as a pattern of high usage, or of sequential calls, or of calls to large numbers of different destinations. But all of the above are valid uses of phones -- I suspect our uucp lines are busy that much, though they only call about 50 numbers. A phone ad service would do as well, though, and many of them are computer-dialed too. Sequential call detection would be easy to program around, of course. Does the phone company even notice this kind of thing? Being a high-tech company in a prime Silicon Valley exchange, I'm curious how many such calls we've gotten -- we haven't detected any, but that means nothing. ---------- Subject: dial-out data calls Do any public data networks offer dial-out calls, e.g. connections which are completed on the remote end by having the network dial a local call with a modem? It seems to me that this would bring significantly more business into the data nets. I know Sun probably can't affort a direct connect to Telenet (hefty up-front charges, a box in your machine room, a leased line to the Telenet C.O., and needs a good bit of traffic to be reasonably priced) but it seems a shame to send (and pay for) 56kbps to decvax when 1kbps is all we need. Of course the per-packet cost of such a link would be greater than on a dedicated link, due to increased use of shared capital equipment, but should still be much lower than Bell long distance. A call could be billed to the caller or could be a collect call if the receiving node has an account with the data net. Under those terms it would be easy for companies like Sun (or even individuals who make many long distance data calls) to become PDN customers. (How many non-Bell sites are on Usenet? Conservatively, hundreds -- and they spend most of the night calling each other, when the PDNs are relatively unloaded.) If the PDN's wanted to go thru the hassle, the could contract with the local telcos like long distance voice providers, to avoid peoples' having to set up billing, etc, ahead of time. I originally conceived of this as a service of the alternate L.D. providers, but they aren't set up for it -- the packet switch companies already have the facilities to move the data efficiently cross-country, they just can't get it across town cheaply. ----------- Subject: Detection of data calls by telco equipment? Can ESS equipment detect whether a data call or voice call is in progress? Do they care (except for echo suppressor disable)? If the volume of calls became sufficiently high it would be a win to switch those calls to modems at a point near the source, and just send bits at low bps rather than 56kbps to the other end. The error rate would hopefully be lower, too. Is the pattern of a data carrier easy to detect in digitized 56/64kbps audio? Could this determination even be done by software? I guess not, or somebody would have built a modem with a codec and a single chip micro. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest *********************