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
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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)
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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).
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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--
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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)? -------
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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?
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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.
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End of TELECOM Digest
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