TELECOM Digest Tue, 25 Apr 95 16:03:00 CDT Volume 15 : Issue 210 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson MCI/NSF High Speed Backbone Network (Stephen Goodman) Internet 1996 World Exposition (Alex Pavlovic) Looking For a Black Box (Andrew Bevan) Setting up as an LD Reseller? (Michael K. Heney) Use of 1-900-555-1212 (Mark Cuccia) RBOC IP legislation scaring local ISPs? (Bob Izenberg) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and America On Line. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available to qualified organizations and individual readers. 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CORPORATE NEWS BUREAU 1-800-289-0073 202-887-3000 INTERNET: newsmci@mcimail.com COMDEX BOOTH #9054 Ron Taylor KETCHUM PUBLIC RELATIONS 202-835-8834 MCI AND THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION ANNOUNCE NEW VERY HIGH SPEED BACKBONE NETWORK SERVICE TO CONNECT NATION'S SUPERCOMPUTER CENTERS Network "R&D Lab of the 21st Century" Will Enable Scientists To Extend High Performance Supercomputer Models To Address Mankind's Grand Challenges ATLANTA (April 24, 1995) - MCI and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the launch of a new network that promises to help solve mankinds Grand Challenges and serve as the blueprint for the Network for the Future. The very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) was announced today by MCI Chairman and CEO Bert C. Roberts, Jr., in a keynote address at the COMDEX exposition here. The vBNS is the first nationwide high-speed network to use advanced information age technologies that enable massive amounts of voice, data and video to be combined and transmitted at speeds nearly four times faster than current technology. Initially the new vBNS will serve as an experimental platform for developing new national networking applications and will link five supercomputing sites around the U.S. It will be used to develop critical technologies and applications that will run over the National Information Infrastructure (NII), sometimes referred to as the Information Superhighway. "Using the very latest technology, vBNS will serve as the R&D lab for the 21st Century," said Roberts. "This network will open a whole new world of support for high speed applications and set the stage for the exploration of business applications comparable to the Grand Challenges. The technology will play a major role in establishing the next generation of networks and be a benchmark for future network models." The vBNS will provide scientists and researchers with faster data links and communications between supercomputing sites working to solve fundamental Grand Challenges in science and engineering. The Grand Challenges, first articulated by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy, are defined as fundamental problems in science and engineering with broad economic and scientific importance whose solutions can be advanced by applying high performance computing techniques and advanced networking resources. Examples include: Understanding the structure of biological molecules in order to fight heart disease; Forecasting weather and predicting global climate changes; Building more energy-efficient autos and airplanes; Improving environmental modeling to understand global warming; Understanding how galaxies are formed; and Understanding the nature of new materials. The vBNS is the next step in the evolution of advanced networking as part of NSF's commitment to furthering high performance computing as well as scientific research and education. The vBNS is designed to provide sufficient capacity for "next generation" networking and supercomputer applications requiring huge multi-supercomputer data exchanges to conduct Grand Challenge kinds of computations. The vBNS will use the capabilities of MCI's nationwide network of advanced switching and fiber optic transmission technologies, known as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Synchronous Optical Network (SONET). The combination of ATM and SONET enables very high-speed, high capacity voice, data, and video signals to be combined and transmitted "on demand." The vBNS initially will operate at speeds of 155 Mbps (million bits of data per second) and is planned to operate at greater than 600 Mbps by 1996. The vBNS speeds are achieved by connecting Internet Protocol (IP) through an ATM switching matrix, and running this combination on the SONET network. Due to its experimental nature, the vBNS is expected to stay a generation ahead of other commercially available network technology. It is specifically designed for high-speed applications, not everyday communications traffic. When upgraded to the next transmission speed, 622 Mbps, the vBNS will be able to carry about 14 times more traffic than the current NSF Network (NSFNET), which carries 100 billion data packets or the equivalent of the Library of Congress holdings, every month. "The vBNS will be a boon to scientists who are limited by current network speeds that cannot take advantage of the supercomputer speeds used in modeling, simulations and visualizations that require accessing and using huge amounts of data," said Paul Young, assistant director of the NSF's directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering. High speed performance computing and networking technologies provided by vBNS will allow scientists to create mathematical models of real life situations and run algorithms that predict changes in those events. Supercomputing and vBNS make it possible to study problems that are either too expensive or difficult to examine through observation or experimentation. Given this new power, scientists are being freed to ask questions they were unable to address five years ago and are coming up with innovative solutions using this new networking technology. The NSF already is in the process of authorizing use of the vBNS network for "meritorious" high-bandwidth applications such as: Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado are currently using supercomputer modeling to experimentally understand how and where icing occurs on aircraft--and also how to avoid altitudes most likely to create ice on aircraft wings. Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, are building computational models to simulate the workings of biological membranes and how cholesterol inserts into membranes. How membranes determine what enters and exits the barrier between the inside and the outside of a cell is still a puzzle to scientists. The vBNS will help scientists remotely access and share the enormous amounts of data required for membrane simulations--information that could ultimately lead to a cure for heart disease. Other applications for high performance computing and vBNS include building more energy-efficient cars; improving environmental modeling; and designing better drugs. The existence of a national high-speed broadband backbone for experiments in networking between supercomputing centers will enable information technology researchers to develop technologies such as high-density video conferencing from personal computers, remote telemedicine and two-way communications between citizens and their government. The five-year, $50-million agreement will tie together the Pittsburgh and San Diego Supercomputing Centers; the Cornell Theory Center; the National Center for Supercomputer Applications in Urbana, Illinois; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. The vBNS also will be accessible to select applications sites through four network access points in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C. The National Science Foundation is an independent agency of the federal government established in 1950 to promote and advance scientific progress through grants to educational and research institutions for research and education in the sciences, mathematics and engineering. MCI, headquartered in Washington, D.C., has expanded from its core long distance business to become the world's third largest carrier of international calling and a premier provider of data communications over the vast Internet computer network. With annual revenue of more than $13.3 billion, the company today provides a wide array of consumer and business long distance and local services, data and video communications, on-line information, electronic mail, network management services and communications software. ------------------------------ Newbridge Networks Announces Sponsorship of Internet 1996 World Exposition KANATA, ONT., March 30, 1995 - Newbridge Networks Corporation, a global leader in networking, announced its sponsorship as an Official Organizer of the Internet 1996 World Exposition, which was formally announced at the NETWORLD+INTEROP 95 conference and exhibition in Las Vegas on March 29. The Internet 1996 World Exposition is a world's fair in the spirit of the great universal expositions of the turn of the last century that marked the beginning of modern industrial economies. The 1996 fair will help to usher in the information economy for the turn of this century. The Internet 1996 World Exposition will be located throughout the world, with centers of activity in multiple cities. The core cities will be connected together with an Internet Railroad, and will feature applications ranging from an Internet Town Hall to a Global Schoolhouse Pavilion to an Industrial Exposition. The fair will build and leave behind a permanent open infrastructure to help drive the world information economy forward. Official Organizers of the Internet 1996 World Exposition include Newbridge Networks, NBC, MCI, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Quantum, and many other leading corporations around the world. Newbridge Networks is providing financial sponsorship for the Exposition, as well as engineering resources and a wide variety of Internet-related products, including: - Broadband switching products including MainStreet multiplexers, frame relay and ATM switches, and network management for the high-capacity backbone of the Internet Railroad; - VIVID ATM LAN systems for high-bandwidth local connectivity in certain pavilions; - Communication cards including SPRITE T1, providing Internet access to servers such as the Sun Netra Internet Server; - TimeStep PERMIT products providing secure TCP/IP communication across the Internet; "We are pleased to welcome Newbridge Networks as an Official Organizer of the Exposition," said Carl Malamud, chairman of the Exposition's Organizing Committee. "With their global leadership in broadband networking, they will make a valuable contribution to the Internet Railroad providing the network backbone for the fair." "We are delighted to be an organizer and participant in this landmark global event," said Terry Matthews, Chairman of Newbridge Networks Corporation. "It grants us the opportunity to help build a broadband Global Information Infrastructure, and demonstrate the resulting economic and societal benefits of a secure, ubiquitous and powerful Internet." Newbridge Networks is an ISO 9001-certified, international company which designs, manufactures, markets and services multimedia, standards-based networking products for global WAN and LAN applications. Facilities are located in Canada, the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East , Asia and Australia. Newbridge Networks Corporation is a public company whose common shares are listed for trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NN) in the United States and on the Toronto Stock Exchange (NNC) in Canada. Newbridge and MainStreet are registered trademarks and VIVID is a trademark of Newbridge Networks Corporation. PERMIT is a trademark of TimeStep Corporation. Netra is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Incorporated. Aleksandar Pavlovic Network Design and Consulting |||\ ||| tel. +1 613 591 3600 NEWBRIDGE NETWORKS CORPORATION |||\\||| fax. +1 613 591 1281 600 March Road, PO Box 13600 |||\\\|| Kanata, ON, K2K 2E6, Canada ||| \\\| pavlovic@newbridge.com ------------------------------ London The telecoms project that I'm working on has a requirement to notify users of certain conditions, externally to the platform that the application is run on, which is a workstation. One solution we have thought of is to utilise the RS-232 serial port, from the workstation, by connecting this to a "black box" containing relays or contact closures. These relays/contact closures could then be connected to the external device (e.g. a flashing light or audible bell). Therefore under the right circumstances within the application, a signal/message would be sent down the RS-232 to open or close the relay, thus triggering the external device. |-------------| |-------| |----------| | HP | RS-232 | Black | | External | | Workstation |=========| Box |-------| Device | |-------------| |-------| |----------| We are having problems finding a suitable black box that could be used within this scenario. Therefore does anyone reading these newsgroups know of a black box that can be used for this purpose or any companies that might be able to help. Please reply directly to me at bevan@bnr.ca, to save filling up this newsgroup. Thanks in advance, Andrew Bevan Internet: bevan@bnr.ca BNR Europe Ltd Telephone: 0181-945-2153 Oakleigh Road South Fax: 0181-945-3116 New Southgate London N11 1HB ------------------------------ I have a few questions about re-selling long-distance service, and I'd appreciate any information or pointers to information sources anyone would care to provide. I'm the point man (because I'm the guy with internet access) on investigating how to set up an LD-reseller operation. What we're trying to do is generate funding for projects currently being pursued by non-profit membership organizations - the idea being that a business can generate more income than membership dues and grants. So, while I'm very good at what I do (and I have run tech-based businesses before) I'm a newbie in this field. So much for the prelims. What I'm trying to find out is: What do I need to know/do to offer 10-xxx LD service? That's kind of general; some of the particular questions I have are: Who regulates this? FCC? States? Regional Bells? We want to operate in all 50 states. Do we need to get approvals ú˙ Does a reseller typically buy capacity from just one carrier, or can you work with more than one at a time? What is involved with getting set up to be selectable as the default for a particular customer; is it different than gettiing a 10-xxx code, or are these tied together? I've seen mention of something called the "ATR" (Association of Telephone Resellers?) - what do they do, and would they be helpful? Any pointers/suggestions of folks who are experienced in setting up an LD reselling operation and could provide advice would also be appreciated. Again, thanks for any help you can give. Mike Heney | Senior Systems Analyst mheney@access.digex.net | Space Activist / Entrepreneur Silver Spring, MD 20901 | Chairman, Mach 25 Technologies ------------------------------ Jeff Smyth wanted to know why/how AT&T got the number 900-555-1212 for 'universal' directory assistance -- AT&T WAS providing a recordrd listing of SOME 900 numbers when one dialed 900-555-1212 (I would assume that the information providers and 900 numbers identified in the recording were ONLY AT&T provided 900 service); There was NO charge at that time to call 900-555-1212; When Bellcore began the assignment process of 900-NXX codes to Carriers about eight years ago, the NXX codes used by AT&T were 'grandfathered' in as assigned to AT&T, as were the NXX codes used in Canada 'grandfathered' in as assigned to the local/provincial operating telephone companies of Telecom-Canada now Stentor; Since 900-555 was a code used by AT&T it was assigned to AT&T under the grandfathering process, and is probably also used by Stentor in Canada; Therefore AT&T could more or less do what they wanted to with 900-555-1212 Similarly, when Bellcore began assigning 800-NXX codes to carriers under the 'Interim' plan about eight or nine years ago, AT&T never had 800-950 assigned or reserved when THEY were the 'only' 800 carrier; MCI requested use of this code, and used 800-950-1022 for a 'Feature Group B' type of access to their network; MCI ALSO began assigning line numbers to other customers of MCI 800 service- I did NOT like the idea of a number such as 800-950-1033 or 800-950-1044 or ANY 800-950-XXXX being used by MCI for assignment to just any MCI 800 service customer - I would have thought that Bellcore would have put a reserve on this 800-NXX for use by each carrier as an alternate form of Feature Group B - like access to that carrier - i.e. you run across a private payphone that refuses access to 950 numbers or wants to charge you a quarter (maybe even 25 cents every 3 minutes) to dial a 950 number, you could then redial it as 800-950; If Bellcore would have reserved 800-950, then Sprint COULD have had 800-950-1033, Allnet would have had 800-950-1044, Pizza Hut would also have had their own 800-950 number just like their local 950 numbers, etc. but in the telecommunications industry, things don't always work out logically as we would have expected them to. Mark J. Cuccia (mcuccia@law,tulane.edu) - Tulane University Law School Library ------------------------------ Are local internet service providers worried about competition from local telephone companies? I've heard two first- or second-hand accounts of existing ISPs holding back or potential ISPs putting startup plans on hold until the effect of "telco providing internet to the home" legislation is clear. The examples that I'm familiar with are from some areas of the country served by Southwestern Bell. I must be missing the competition peril here. The RBOC ventures into local data services have been unimpressive and short-lived. Maybe something could be pulled together with a cooperative effort between local telcos and established service providers... ISDN bundled with AOL or Compuserve, to pick two experienced-user-unfriendly examples (in my opinion, of course.) What I don't see is how this type of metered ISP is competition for flat-rate service from local service providers. Of course, if there are no ISPs serving an area, then the judgment of "Is the cost of a long-distance call to xyz.com's point of presence plus the cost of their service less than the cost of a call to the telco's offering plus the cost of their service?" I expect that users making more than casual use of their connection to "the happening world" will find the local ISPs a better value. Is this concern over potential competition from telcos to local internet service providers warranted? Bob Izenberg 512-442-0614 / 617-728-1416 / 800-946-4645, pager 1109500 bei@io.com / bei@dogface.austin.tx.us / bei@pencom.com ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V15 #210 ****************************