From telecom-request@delta.eecs.nwu.edu Thu May 4 13:53:27 1995 by 1995 13:53:27 -0400 telecomlist-outbound; Thu, 4 May 1995 10:06:17 -0500 1995 10:06:14 -0500 To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu TELECOM Digest Thu, 4 May 95 10:06:00 CDT Volume 15 : Issue 221 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Very Unhappy Customer Writes to MCI (Philip L. Dubois) Suggestions For Two or Three Line PC Based Phone System? (karlca@delphi) Florida 305/954 Split - Still Happening? (Greg Monti) Voice/Data Multiplexer for 64kb Leased Line? (Magnus Harlander) Taking my Laptop to the UK (Charles Ogilvie) Area Code 503 Split in Oregon (Leonard Erickson) Book Review: "Student's Guide to the Internet" by Clark (Rob Slade) Looking For Nationwide Data/Voice Providers (Jeff Tyler) High Speed RS422 I/F For PC (Russell George) Roaming in NYC (Tony Harminc) Com Problems With USR Sportster V.34 (Thor Stromsnes) Nokia 2110 vs Motorola 8200 (Nick Pitfield) Mexico Billing Method: Digit Analysis or Meter Pulse? (John E. Brissenden) Caller ID Format Varies? (Charles Copeland) Question From Brussels About Telecom in Latin America (Aurora Ferlin) Re: ThinkPad Modem in India (Martin Kealey) Re: ThinkPad Modem in India (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) 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. Write and tell us how you qualify: * telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu * The Digest is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson of Skokie, Illinois USA. You can reach us by postal mail, fax or phone at: 9457-D Niles Center Road Skokie, IL USA 60076 Phone: 500-677-1616 Fax: 708-329-0572 ** Article submission address only: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu ** Our archives are located at lcs.mit.edu and are available by using anonymous ftp. The archives can also be accessed using our email information service. For a copy of a helpful file explaining how to use the information service, just ask. ************************************************************************ * * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent- * * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************ * Additionally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 3 May 1995 MCI P.O. Box 7400 London, KY 40742-7400 Re: acct. # ------------ Sir/madam: Having extricated myself from your company's incompetent clutches (by switching to Sprint), I was content to let the matter rest. You, regrettably, were not. Your employees continue to call to waste even more of my time. I therefore write to tell you not to call me -- more specifically, not to call any of the numbers for which you formerly provided service. I was induced to switch to MCI from AT&T by, inter alia, your representation that I would receive a certificate for a month's free service (up to $1000), which certificate I could apply against any month's bill I chose. Your salesperson also made specific representations about various services like account codes and 800 service. These representations included prices. I ordered some of your products in reliance on these representations. It soon became apparent that the service I received was not what I ordered and the prices were not what they had been represented to be. It took several weeks and much phone conversation and correspondence to get it all straightened out. Worse, the free-service certificate never arrived. Ever. When I inquired, I was given some numbers over the phone and told to simply attach a note containing these numbers to the bill to which I wanted the certificate to apply and everything would be fine. So I did, and it wasn't. Not long thereafter, I got a dunning letter saying that my account was seriously past due. It turned out that the certificate had not been applied as I'd directed but instead to the most recent invoice. I was told that I should have received no dunning notice or calls, that my account was current, and that everything was taken care of. Shortly after that, I got another dunning notice and more phone calls about my past-due account. This time, I was told that the certificate was applied as MCI chose to apply it and that if I didn't pay the requisite amount by the requisite date, my service would be cut off. I know that the complaints of we few are far outweighed by the income you get from the thousands of new subscribers you entice by false promises of reliability and integrity. I know that your contempt for your customers is matched only by your greed for market share and that you couldn't care less about anything that doesn't get the attention of the FCC, which this letter almost certainly won't. Nevertheless, I will relate the foregoing facts to my friends and family, send a copy of this letter to the FCC, and post this letter on the Internet, where maybe a few thousand of the millions of Internet users will read it. You are instructed not to call me or my family or my business or to send me any solicitation materials by mail or otherwise. You have wasted enough of my time. Sincerely, Philip L. Dubois ------------------------------ Greetings, I have a small office that is slowly increasing in size and business and I have always been able to use one phone line and one person answering it. I now have a need to add one or two more lines but I cannot hire another person quite yet to handle this (yet). My requirements are for some type of system that will pick up my incoming calls if someone is on line one, give them a welcome message, allow them to hold until line one is available, and then forward the call. I would like the option of requiring them to leave a message after some given time and the important part here is the ability to answer more than one call at the same time. Hunting them together via Nynex is no problem from what I understand. One solution would be to put a $50 answering machine on each line but obviously it does not forward the call and its kinda 'crude' . I have checked around with some local company's and most have recommend PBX systems or Key systems and then buy the software for the PC and link them. These have ranged in costs from $2000 to $10,000 and up for complete systems. My budget though does not begin to come close to that so any suggestions, pointers or product recommendations that are within a range of $500-$1000 would be appreciated. Note: I do have some PC's sitting around to use and I can "combine" several products to maybe meet my needs. TIA, Karl karlca@delphi.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Why don't you try a combination of PC and voicemail you build yourself, possibly using Big Mouth or something similar? Have a PC answer your second line with a message that goes something like this: "Thank you for calling; right now all agents are busy with other customers, but while you are waiting several recorded messages are available which may answer your questions, and of course if you wish you may speak to an agent as soon as one becomes available. For information about X, press one; for information about Y, press two. Press zero at any time to wait for an agent to become available. If you are calling from a rotary dial phone, please hold until an agent is available." You then take the half dozen or so 'most commonly asked questions and answers' (if there is such a thing in your business, such as your hours of operation, location, etc) and make little messages behind the various buttons which can be pressed. After each message is played out, another message comes on which says "Agents are still busy, please make another selection or press zero if you wish to wait for an agent to become available." They then press other buttons to hear other messages, or simply wait. If they press zero to reach an agent, in the case of Big Mouth at least, the transfer function causes the speaker attached to announce to you that 'call is holding, please pick up the phone.' As soon as you pick up the line and press a touch tone key on your end, Big Mouth shuts itself off and waits for the next caller. If you combine the Big Mouth transfer function with Call Transfer from your local telco, then once the waiting call has been passed over to you on the first line, Big Mouthh is freed up to take another call on the overflow line and hold it until you become available. PAT] ------------------------------ What has happened with the Florida 305/954 area code split? My old notes say it was supposed to have taken effect in early March, 95. A later note says authorities were debating whether a split or an overlay was appropriate. Haven't seen anything on it in comp.dcom.telecom in the intervening two months. Any news from the Sunshine State? Greg Monti gmonti@cais.com ------------------------------ We are looking for a data/voice multiplexer for a leased 64kb digital line. We want to use some portion of the bandwidth for phone calls to and from a PBX extension and the rest for IP traffic. The leased line speaks the G.703 protocol (there would be an alternative using I.430). Any information about implementations, producers and distributors is appreciated. Thanx, Magnus V. Harlander --- GeNUA harlan@genua.de Gesellschaft f"ur Netzwerk- harlan@physik.tu-muenchen.de und Unix-Administration --- Tel: +49(89)99195010 --- and Physics Dep. TUM --- Fax: +49(89)99195029 ------------------------------ Does anybody know what I will need to purchase in order to use my lapop in London and surrounding areas? I think I will need some sort of power adaptor and some sort of modem adapter. If you have any suggestions, I would really appreciate hearing them. Also, does anybody know any good PPP internet providers in the UK? Thanks very much, Charles Please reply via email to: ogilvie@usc.edu ------------------------------ According to tonight's news, NPA 503 will split. There had been discussion about having an overlay, but apparently the comments to the PUC were in favor of the split. The new NPA will be 541. It will cover most of the state. Only the NW corner of the state will keep 503. This includes Portland and Salem. My guess is that it'll follow the LATA boundary from the coast until it starts to turn south (somewhere east of Salem) and then the AC boundary will head north. This is based on the crude maps shown so far, and a glance at the LATA boundaries shown in the phone book. The permissive period starts Nov 5, 1995 and ends Jun 30, 1996. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Around here somewhere I have a list of which prefixes go where according to a reader who sent in the information and I shall try to publish that soon. PAT] ------------------------------ BKSTDINT.RVW 950320 "Student's Guide to the Internet", Clark, 1995, 1-56761-545-7, U$14.99/C$20.95 %A David Clark clarkd@bvsd.k12.co.us %C 201 W. 103rd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46290 %D 1995 %G 1-56761-545-7 %I Alpha Books %O U$14.99/C$20.95 800-858-7674 75141.2102@compuserve.com %P 314 %T "Student's Guide to the Internet" Yes, this is well-suited to be a student's guide. There is just enough information on the various aspects of the Internet (well, we could do with maybe just a touch more information on SLIP) without going into turgid detail. The tone is very light; almost, but perhaps not quite, flippant. After a general introduction to the types of applications, chapter two talks about getting connected. This topic still gets the weakest coverage in Internet texts. (The fact that this is understandable, given the range of options, does not help the frustrations of the uninitiated.) The coverage here, while still weak, is better than most. Chapters three through ten give brief, but basic, information on UNIX, email, Usenet news, Gopher, World Wide Web, ftp, IRC and WAIS. The selling of Gopher and WWW tends to be a bit overenthusiastic, but Clark redeems himself with the first realistic coverage of SlipKnot that I can recall. Chapter eleven is a topical catalogue of resources, while twelve has a list of access providers (including Freenets). Chapter thirteen is a miscellaneous "FAQ" (Frequently Asked Questions list) of random information. There is a helpful appendix listing Internet client software and where to get it. The tone and level are easily appropriate for the target audience. A good, basic starting point for Internet exploration. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1995 BKSTDINT.RVW 950320. Distribution permitted in TELECOM Digest and associated publications. Rob Slade's book reviews are a regular feature in the Digest. Vancouver ROBERTS@decus.ca | "Is it plugged in?" Institute for Robert_Slade@sfu.ca | "I can't see." Research into Rob.Slade@f733.n153.z1/ | "Why not?" User .fidonet.org | "The power's off Security Canada V7K 2G6 | here." ------------------------------ My company is ready to submit an RFP for a nationwide voice/data network. We are replacing an existing uucp/ppp data network and leased voice trunking with a private internet to tie our NYC office to five regional offices around the company and to our existing Internet connection in NYC. We are open to all technologies with the only stipulation being that the vendor must provide a total voice/data solution and end to end technical sufficiency. We plan to invite anyone that claims to run a telco to respond to this RFP so if you are interested, email me to conserve bandwidth. We plan to release the RFP in the next few days so a prompt response would be appreciated. Jeff S. Tyler Pencom System Administration| |jeff@jthome.com [home] [voice/fax] 508-297-4316/3453 | |jtyler@pencom.com [office] 617-443-1111 ------------------------------ We need a source for a high speed RS422 interface for a PC. As you know the RS422 I/F is speced at 10 MB/s. Yet, the only serial cards we have been able to find so far are speced at 115.2 kB/s. We really need 1-2 MB/s for our application. We need to synchronously pump blocks of data to a telemetry bit sync which has an RS422 I/F. ·_ Thanks in advance for your help, Russell ------------------------------ What's the current state of affairs with cellular roaming in New York City? The local Cantel office first said it was turned off, then said it was back on, and finally said that they didn't really know and I should just try it when I get there! I did try calling the NYC "A" system roam port and keying in my own cellphone's number (the phone was with me here in Toronto), and received an immediate reorder tone. I would expect their switch to at least try paging my phone before giving up, so perhaps this means things are not good. All I really want to do is make local calls, but it would be nice to be able to receive the odd call too. Tony H. ------------------------------ I am having some problems with my PPP internet hookup. After about 10-15 min online, my V.34 Sportster just "hangs up". I use trumpet winsock and netscape software, and I have set the internal baud rate to 115.200, in order to handle compession. Is this a hardware problem, or what? Thor ------------------------------ Greetings, I'm about to buy a GSM phone, and have settled on either the Nokia 2110 or the Motorola 8200. Does anybody have good or bad experiences or opinions about these that they could share with me. Also, could somebody tell me where I can find the files describing how to re-program certain things on these phones: eg I had the file for the Nokia 101 last year and was able to change both the lock code and the start-up message. Regards, Nick Pitfield EMAIL : Nick.Pitfield@x400gate.bnr.ca SNAILMAIL : Nortel-DASA Network Systems GmbH & Co KG, An der Bundesstrasse 31, 88090 Immenstaad/Bodensee, Germany VOICEMAIL : Germany +49-7545-96-2057 ESN 565-2057 UK +44-1628-79-4476 ESN 590-4476 ------------------------------ Does Mexico / Central America use a digit analysis method for calculating charges, or a metered pulse method? What I'm actually refering to is the SMDR output on a PBX. I believe the U.S. is in the minority in using digit analysis, or am I wrong? Thanks, John ------------------------------ 0400)) The Bellcore spec GR-30 for Caller-ID format dictates it shall have three parts: 1) 30 bytes of 55H (preamble); 2) 70-150ms of marks; 3) caller id data. However I've noticed on our lines to GTE here in Dallas doesn't always follow this standard. 90 percent of the time GTE conforms to the standard, but the other 10 percent the preamble is entirely missing. I wrote firmware to conform to the GR-30 Bellcore document, and now I find telco doesn't conform. I've verified the missing preamble with both my firmware and storage scope. Curiously, the cheapo Radio Shack caller id box works just fine whether the preamble is present or missing. Is this some older equipment out there that conformed to some outdated standard unknown to me? Anybody know out there? KC5LWF copeland@metronet.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So -- take a hint from the Radio Shack people and write your firmware to accept the preamble if it shows up and live without it if it doesn't. If the preamble is absolutely essential to your application, then write a default one which your firmware will apply when the 'real' one is missing. And how, you ask, is the firmware going to know if its missing or not? Look for some unique characters or string of characters which appears in the preamble but nowhere else. If that does not come through right away then swap your own in there and proceed. PAT] ------------------------------ I am a student at the Free University of Brussels and I am working on a paper about telecommunications in Latin America. Any information about policy, satellite communications, informatics or telephony is welcome. Thank you, hw45141@is2.vub.ac.be (FERLIN AURORA) Student Communicatiewetenschappen Vrije Universiteit Brussel [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do any of you folks ever go to the library and do your own research? Please don't keep asking me to do your homework for you. Thank you. PAT] ------------------------------ > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Sid, in the future when you want to have > 'local calls' go to a different number, you might want to include an > *area code* in your .signature so people can tell what is local and what > is not ... PAT] In the future when you want to have 'national calls' go to a different number, you might want to include a *country code* in your .signature so people can tell which zone you're calling from. Martin D Kealey voice fax lat/long home: martin@kurahaupo.gen.nz 0-9-8150460 0-9-8150529 36.88888S/174.72116E work: martin@econz.co.nz 0-9-3788611 0-9-3789010 36.85300S/174.77900E Oops, sorry wrong .sig, try this one :-) Martin D Kealey voice fax lat/long home: martin@kurahaupo.gen.nz +64-9-8150460 +64-9-8150529 36.88888S/174.72116E work: martin@econz.co.nz +64-9-3788611 +64-9-3789010 36.85300S/174.77900E [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, technically you are correct, but since by default, the Digest is primarily a USA thing -- about 90 percent of the readers are in the USA -- I suppose the country code is not absolutely essential unless you are from another country. Nice thought though. PAT] ------------------------------ > I have an IBM 340 ThinkPad with an internal 96/24 fax-modem. I will > be taking this laptop back with me to South India (Hyderabad) later > this year. [...] In the manual it says to use the internal fax/modem > in the US only. What I would like to know is this because of some sort > of regulatory warning -- or is it that these modems just won't work > overseas (specifically I am interested in using it in India). Any You're not supposed to use modems that are not locally approved here, but they work fine. I don't see why there should be any problem; while I haven't used a ThinkPad modem, the internal modem in Apple PowerBooks work OK. Not all places in India will have RJ11 sockets handy. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh rishab@dxm.ernet.in rishab@arbornet.org Vox +91 11 6853410 Voxmail 3760335 H 34C Saket, New Delhi 110017, INDIA ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V15 #221 ******************************