TELECOM Digest Fri, 23 Sep 94 13:10:00 CDT Volume 14 : Issue 373 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FBI Wiretap Bill -- WTF? (Mahatma Kane-Jeeves) I Want to Be an LD Rep (interbiz@aol.com) Coming Soon: Son of 800 (Greg Monti) Three Prefixes Moved From 215 to 717 (Carl Moore) Programming an AT&T ISDN Phone (Alex Cena) Where Can I Locate Telecom Documents? (ds3man@delphi.com) Free Calls Offered to Service Members (Bert Roseberry) AT&T and McCaw Merger (pault@panix.com) Need Help With Fax and Answering Service (Alan N. Canton) EIA/TIA 568 Standards (Wilson Mohr) Internet Windows Interface Job Offer (Murray Gordon) Need California PUC IRD Information (Al Cohan) Book Review: "The Elements of E-mail Style" by Angell/Heslop (Rob Slade) 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 at no charge 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: 708-329-0571 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. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: mkj@world.std.com (Mahatma Kane-Jeeves) Subject: FBI Wiretap Bill -- WTF? Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 05:09:56 GMT I imagine most of you here have heard about the FBI's Digital Telephony proposal, aka the Digital Wiretap bill, by now. (If you haven't, please check out the EFF, CPSR, EPIC, and sources of Voters Telecom Watch info.) I thought this group might be a good place to ask for some technical insights into the bill's rationale. The FBI has claimed (but has offered scant evidence) that advances in "digital technology" are making the telephone system impossible to tap. Personally, I don't get it. What kinds of taps are they talking about? As far as I know, you can still tap most phones the old-fashioned way -- by going up the pole or down into the basement with a pair of alligator clips, right? More to the point, you can tap any phone by going to the carrier with a proper warrant and getting their cooperation (in fact, the major carriers have claimed that there has NEVER been a case where a legitimate agency has come to them with a proper warrant and not gotten a tap). So I'm trying to figure out, just what is this bill about -- REALLY? My own theory -- based on almost NO real knowledge, I admit -- is that the problems the FBI is having with digital communications must be in connection with either (1) doing taps without proper authorization, or (2) doing general surveillance on trunks (which used to be easy-to-intercept microwave links but are lately being replaced with difficult-to-intercept optical fiber). I'd appreciate it if anybody here with a better technical grasp of the situation could enlighten me further. What the @#$%&! are they talking about? Am I too paranoid, or not paranoid enough? Thanks in advance for any insights. mkj [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My own opinion is that the people making the protests are by and large over-reacting. I've included some of their press releases and 'write your congressperson' requests here in this Digest in an effort to be fair about it and give their side of the story, but honestly, I can't see what they have gotten in such an uproar over. The other day someone sent in something saying 'congressman so-and-so says he has not received a single letter from citizens in opposition to the bill ...', and while some of that lack of letter writing may be due to the ignorance of the general public on 'how telephones work', I do beleive some of it is also due to the fact that most people don't feel as threatened by these things as do the denizens of EFF and various privacy advocates on the net. Of course a fair rebuttal to that might be that it is precisely because of that general ignorance of telephone operations that people are not alarmed; that if the public in general knew as much about telephone networks and systems as a few of us do, they too would be greatly concerned and busy letter writing, etc. Like yourself, I find its simply too easy to tap telephones without being caught at it to concern myself with some new legislation on the subject. In any large older urban area, illicit tapping of telephones is child's play. Just get your alligator clips and go do it at any one of a dozen demarcs between the subscriber and the central office where the cable pairs are multipled, or available. I am not saying I *do that*; I do not do it, and I think it ethically wrong, but anyone can do it very easily. Between the many cellular/cordless phone snoops out there listening and the other easy ways there are of listening to phones, why should anyone care about still new proposals, government or otherwise? PAT] ------------------------------ From: interbiz@aol.com (InterBiz) Subject: I Want to Be an LD Rep Date: 23 Sep 1994 01:30:02 -0400 Organization: America Online, Inc. (1-800-827-6364) I am interested in being a rep for selling long distance. However, I have a few requirements: 1) I don't want to sell an MLM. My goal isn't to find 50 motivated people, it is to sell long distance with very good rates. I'd like the product to sell itself. I don't want to go to Amway-type prayer meetings where the discussions are how we will someday be rich. 2) I want to have the lowest or one of the lowest rates consumers can get. I want the rates to be impressive, so the service can sell itself. Is it possible to become a rep without being entangled with the MLM organization? Can one sell direct for a company and bypass all the middlemen of an MLM (I would think this would allow giving better rates to consumers). Please E-mail me any info that meets my requirements. Thanks. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If you don't like the Amway style of doing things then select one of the countless other large 'switchless resellers' of the major carriers. There are too many out there to even begin naming them. In fact, there are so many out there -- many not at all like Amway -- the profit margin on this has been squeezed dry. You've got to get literally thousands of accounts under your control to reach the point where your tiny fractional part of the whole pie amounts to anything more than maybe a hundred dollars a month. After all the work I did on Orange Card a couple years ago for example, I have finally gotten to the point they send me around fifty dollars every month as residuals for the customers I sent their way. None of them will pay you an actual salary -- that is, unless you are on their payroll and under their direct supervision -- it will always be straight commission on traffic generated, generally with a delay of sixty to ninety days following the traffic to allow the customer to pay them and then in turn for them to pay you. You should plan on working three or four months virtually full time receiving *no money at all* from the carriers before the comissions -- what there are of them -- start coming in. You'll have to answer lots of time-consuming questions for comparison shoppers who won't ever sign up with you anyway. If you plan on doing this full time, you'll need a few thousand dollars in reserve to live on while waiting for the orders to go through, get turned on and the traffic to start, to say nothing of hoping to Goddess the people pay their bills to the carrier and are not deadbeats. Yes, many of the carriers have recourse to you as the independent agent in the event the bills are not paid. And if you only do it as a part time thing while keeping another full time job to live on, it will take ten times as long to reach the point where your commissions or residuals on traffic amount to anything meaningful. Plan on spending all your weekends and every night answering email and filling out paperwork. Seriously, I would not want to go back to doing that. I tried it for a year or so; I am still starving and trying to catch up financially in my personal life. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Sep 1994 7:30:43 -0400 (EDT) From: Greg Monti Subject: Coming Soon: Son of 800 A brief article in {Business Week} magazine, September 26, 1994, issue under the name "I-Way Patrol" and entitled "Coming Soon, Son of 800," says that the 800 code is running out of telephone numbers. 800 numbers went from zero in 1967 to to 3.1 million in 1993. The one-year step from 93 to 94, brought it to 4.1 million numbers. The capacity of the code is supposedly 7.6 million numbers, which will be reached by 1996. The article notes that business voice-response systems and inexpensive personal 800 number users are among the trends that soak up numbers. The Industry Numbering Committee is chewing over the idea of supplementing 800 with a second code, probably 300 or 400. Cute graphic accompanies: a telephone with what looks like an automobile odometer on it, reading 1 800 999 9999, with the 999 9999 part about to "turn over" like a car that hits a million miles. Greg Monti, Tech Mgr, FISPO, Distribution Division National Public Radio Phone: +1 202 414-3343 635 Massachusetts Av NW Fax: +1 202 414-3036 Washington, DC 20001-3753 Internet: gmonti@npr.org ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 14:18:53 GMT From: Carl Moore Subject: Three Prefixes Moved From 215 to 717 Thanks to Paul A. Lee (email address /DD.ID=JES2CAOF.UEDCM09/@smx.sprint.com) I have received the following copies of letters regarding prefixes moving from 215 to 717 (not to 610), because their telephone companies also serve adjacent exchanges in area 717. A while back, there was the blurb about Denver 267 and Adamstown 484 going to 717 (Denver using 717-336 because 717-267 is in use at Chambersburg), but there is new information: that 445 Terre Hill has moved to 717. Before I learned that Terre Hill had moved to 717, I thought Terre Hill had dropped 1 for long distance within area code and that Enterprise Telephone's area 717 part had also done so. ******* (letter regarding Denver and Adamstown) January 11, 1993 Our Denver, PA., and Adamstown, PA., exchanges are presently in the 215 area code. On January 1, 1994, Bell of PA. is splitting the 215 NPA into 215 and 610. Also, the state of Pennsylvania is going to implement a new dialing pattern for intra-NPA calls. Because of these two changes, the Denver and Ephrata Telephone and Telegraph Company has decided to move both the Denver and Adamstown exchanges from the 215 NPA into the 717 NPA. Our Adamstown exchange is presently 215-484 and will become 717-484. Our Denver exchange is presently 215-267 and will become 717-336. The reassignment of these two exchanges from NPA 215 to NPA 717 will take effect at 12:01 a.m., Thursday, July 1, 1993. From July 1, 1993, until April 1, 1994, we will accept incoming calls to either the 215 or 717 NPA codes. As of April 1, 1994, we will only accept incoming calls to the 717 NPA code. As of July 1, 1993, the 10 digit Automatic Number Identification (ANI) from these two exchanges will be 717-484-XXXX for Adamstown and 717-336-XXXX for Denver. Please make any required preparations within your company for these changes. Thanks you in advance for your assistance. Very truly yours, Leonard A. Burns Manager, Central Office Engineering (Denver and Ephrata Telephone and Telegraph Company) ******* (letter regarding Terre Hill) March 26, 1993 With the announcement from Bell of PA that the 215 NPA will split in January of 1994, Enterprise Telephone Company has decided to reassign our Terre Hill Exchange (NXX 445) to the 717 NPA. Customer notification began in January of 1993. Please use this letter as your company's official notice that this number change will be effective 1/94, coinciding with the Bell of PA 215 split. Sincerely, John H. Gehr General Manager (Enterprise Telephone) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 10:24:58 EST From: Alex Cena Subject: Programming an AT&T ISDN Phone I recently signed up for an ISDN service to my home. It was a nightmare to have the company deliver the service since there are very few people who trained to help you and the current downsizing does not help. After Bell Atlantic agreed to install the line, it took thirty days for the first installer to arrive and one and a half weeks before the service was actually working properly. It took no less than two technicians at a time to finally have it working. Now for my problem. The ISDN station set arrived by mail. It's an AT&T ISDN 7506 API. The phone works fine, but a programming manual did not come with the phone for reasons unknown to me so I have to call an AT&T help desk every time I need help. They in turn have to page an engineer to help me out. Can someone help me program this phone for use as three phantom lines and program some of he basic buttons to work. i.e. drop, hold, conference. If I want to use it as two voice and one data, how? Where can I find a programming manual for this darned thing? Regards, Alex M. Cena, Lehman Brothers, acena@lehman.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If you have not yet paid for the phone which arrived in the mail, the easiest thing to do at this point is not pay for it until the documentation arrives. If you have already paid try stopping the credit card charge if that's still possible on the premise that the order was shipped incomplete. PAT] ------------------------------ From: ds3man@delphi.com Subject: Where Can I Locate Telecom Documents? Date: Thu, 22 Sep 94 22:31:38 -0500 Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice) Does anyone have a good FTP address or telnet address for telecom documents? I am mainly looking for standards or tutorials on subjects like X.25, SS7, etc. Thanks a lot. ------------------------------ From: Bert Roseberry Subject: Free Calls Offered to Service Members Organization: Digital Equipment Computer Users Society Date: 22 Sep 94 23:32:29 -0400 I thought others might be interested in this offer from AT&T. -------------- Navy News Service - NAVNEWS BY EMAIL - navnews@opnav-emh.navy.mil NAVY NEWS SERVICE - 22 SEP 94 - NAVNEWS 057/94 NNS617. Free Calls Home Offered to Service Members in Caribbean WASHINGTON (NNS) -- Free three-minute phone calls home are being offered by AT&T to service members deployed on board U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships involved in Cuba/Haiti operations in the Caribbean. Sailors and Marines can place calls to the U.S. mainland, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The free offer will begin at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, Sept. 24 and end on 11:59 p.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 26. The AT&T High Seas Radiotele- phone Service can be used by an any vessel with high frequency, Single Side Band (SSB) radiotelephone service, often referred to aboard ships as Military Affiliated Radio Service (MARS). To place the free phone calls, each ship's radio officer will select a channel to call one of AT&T's coast stations (WOM in Florida or WOO in New Jersey). When the signal is clear, the technician at the coast station will pass the call to an AT&T operator. The service member will tell the operator the number she or he is trying to reach and the call will be connected. When that service member's time is up, the phone will be passed to the next person and they will give their number to the operator. This way, a channel does not have to be obtained for each individual call. When U.S. military personnel arrive in Haiti, long distance service to the U.S. is available. Bert Roseberry roseberry@eisner.decus.org -or- US Coast Guard roseberry@duane.comdt.uscg.mil ------------------------------ From: pault@panix.com (Paul) Subject: AT&T and McCaw Merger Date: 22 Sep 1994 21:13:56 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC I would like to know what you all think of the merger between AT&T and Mccaw. a: Do you believe that this will lower cellular rates in Mccaw markets? b: Do you believe that it will effect employment in both companies? Any responses would be greatly appreciated. ------------------------------ From: acanton@delphi.com Subject: Need Help With Fax and Answering Service Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 00:10:43 -0500 Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice) Our answering service wants to auto-fax messages to our business. Our Brother 600 fax machine has a telephone answering device interface, so we connect an AT&T (two tape) answering machine to it. With everyone else on the planet, the system works fine. The answer machine comes on and then shuts down and the fax is received. However, with the answering service, most of the time the answering machine comes on, clicks off and the line is dropped. The fax is not received. It does work every once in a while. Can anyone give me some suggestions (besides getting a dedicated fax line ... too expensive) on what to do ... if anything. Please e-mail. Alan N. Canton ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Sep 94 11:48:23 CDT From: mohr@orange.rtsg.mot.com (Wilson Mohr) Subject: EIA/TIA 568 Standards Vic.Franco@lambada.oit.unc.edu writes: > Does anyone know if the new EIA/TIA 568 standard has been set, and > where can I retrieve it on the Internet? Well, Toby Nixon of Hayes Mirocomputer Products (tnixon%hayes@uunet.uu. net) provided this information back in November, 1992. Quote: The Electronic Industries Association (EIA) and Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) have contracted out the distribution of their published standards to Global Engineering Documents. All orders for EIA or TIA standards should now be directed to Global Engineering Documents instead of the EIA/TIA Sales Department (although EIA/TIA still handles proposed standards and other work in progress). Global Engineering Documents can be reached at: For inquiries from within the USA: Global Engineering Documents 1990 M Street NW, Suite 400 Washington DC 20036 800-854-7179 Voice 202-331-0960 Fax For inquiries from outside the USA: Global Engineering Documents 2805 McGaw Avenue Irvine CA 92714 +1-714-261-1455 Unquote: The EIA and TIA documents are not "freeware" (for lack of a better term) as far as I know. They are meant to be purchased. As a datapoint, I did call them this morning on an unrelated issue. Their current cost for the 568 standards is $80 plus 5% Shipping and Handling plus applicable local sales tax. They also have a version of the new proposed 568 standards revision for $122 plus (et.al). The mailing address they gave me was: Global Engineering Documents 7730 Carondelet Avenue Suite 407 Clayton, Missourri 63105 Wilson Mohr mohr@cig.mot.com Strategic Quality - Motorola Cellular Infrastructure Group 1501 W. Shure Drive - Rm 3C9, Arlington Heights, IL 60004 USA ------------------------------ From: quetzal@panix.com (Murray Gordon) Subject: Internet Windows Interface Job Offer Date: 23 Sep 1994 13:31:06 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and Unix, NYC INTERNET/WINDOWS Programmers wanted: We need to get some experienced Windows programmers on board soon, for a project for a client, who wants to create a Windows interface for accessing the Internet. (Similar to Pipeline) If you have experience in writing for Windows (probably Visual C++, but we might consider other languages for this development project), and hopefully you know the "ins and outs" of the Internet reasonably well, then: Contact: Murray Gordon Quetzal Computers 1708 E 4th St. Brooklyn, NY 11223 Phone 718-375-1186. Fax 718-645-1496, or respond via CIS mail, or via the Internet to Quetzal@panix.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Sep 94 11:47 EST From: Al Cohan <0004526627@mcimail.com> Subject: Need California PUC IRD Information I understand that sometime last week the California PUC approved a sweeping rate change for both Pac Bell and General Telephone. I have heard that base rates have dramatically increased and ZUM 3 and local service area long distance has decreased as much as 50%. This PUC decision sets the terms for Intra-Lata toll traffic competition. Does anyone have a synopsis of the new rates? or a copy of the decision? Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance, Al ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 15:46:37 EST From: Rob Slade Subject: Book Review: "The Elements of E-mail Style" by Angell/Heslop BKMALSTL.RVW 940526 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company P.O. Box 520 26 Prince Andrew Place Don Mills, Ontario M3C 2T8 416-447-5101 fax: 416-443-0948 73171.657@Compuserve.com tiffanym@aw.com bobd@aw.com johnw@aw.com keithw@aw.com lisaro@aw.com "The Elements of E-mail Style", Angell, 1994, 0-201-62709-4, U$12.95/C$16.95 dangell@shell.portal.com bheslop@shell.portal.com On the one hand, electronic mail is simply another form of written communications. On the other hand, email's very earliest beginnings lie only twenty years back. Ten years ago, less than a million people in the world had access to the medium, and the rapid growth in the popularity of email, while it means there are many current practitioners, also means that few users have any depth of experience. In addition, the speed and ease of electronic communications allow the unwary to get themselves into considerable trouble. There is, therefore, a need for an email style guide. That is not to say that it need be this one. Indeed, it is very difficult to say that this is an email guide, at all. It is simply a writing and style guide, and, for those in the market for such an item, it may be suitable as a quick reference. As far as email goes, however, while mention is frequent, material is scant. The content would seem to indicate that the authors, while they have some familiarity with the use of email, have very little experience with the broad range of online communications systems, and no feel for computer mediated communications as a whole. The limited exposure shows up in areas such as the coverage of, for example, flaming (the generation of abusive messages). Their suggestions, while not inappropriate, are not particularly helpful, either. Read your message twice. (From experience, this just tends to increase your determination.) Would you say this to the person's face? (Heck, yes! I'm mad!) A more practical alternative is to write it, hold it, and then re-read the original message before sending it. (And remember, if the original message isn't worth re-reading, it isn't worth a response, either.) Another indication of limited experience is the use of specific suggestions rather than general principles. Line length and font styles are mentioned in regard to terminal characteristics, but there is no discussion of common terminal characteristics or alternative forms of emphasis. We are told not to say "no" to an offer from a Japanese correspondent but with no other examples of cultural diversity, this is of little use. Chapter one is a list of the standard email do's and don'ts. The points are generally good, but the supporting text is less than useful. Chapter two *is* useful; a very cogent list of suggestions for structuring email text for greatest impact. Chapters three to seven, covering vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, spelling and punctuation, could be summed up in two words: learn English. The material specific to email from all five chapters is, in total, less than the space devoted to one list of frequently misspelled words. Chapter eight gives some recommendations on the use of formatting and special characters. Some points are good; many (such as the use of tabs for column alignment) are not. (Many systems use eight character cells for a tab character, but some use other alignments and thus, tabs can be more trouble than help.) Most of the chapter, however, is dedicated to the promotion of ASCII art and the use of special characters. The special characters are those that use the eighth bit. These are sometimes called "high ASCII" or "upper ASCII" and are, in truth, not ASCII or any other standard. Fidonet echo rules often expressly forbid the use of such characters, since they may be deleted by mail transfer agents, be incomprehensibly different on the end user's system, or, in the worst case, be system control characters. A glossary is included which would have been more useful if it had more terms from email (IMHO) than from English class. An appendix about Internet posting conventions talks only about Usenet and basically recaps suggestions made earlier. For those completely new to email and net systems, this does contain points to ponder, with some shortcomings in terms of practical advice. For the B1FFs of the world, they could certainly stand to learn English but probably won't. For those interested in a serious examination of the email field, this will be disappointing. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKMALSTL.RVW 940526. Distribution permitted in TELECOM Digest and associated newsgroups/mailing lists. DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Sept. '94) Springer-Verlag [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I rarely comment on anything in Mr. Slade's reviews, but something definitly needs correction this time. Email did NOT begin 'only twenty years back'. If Telex and TWX were not considered email, then I don't know what you would call them. Telex and TWX were both essenti- ally the same product with the former having been developed by Western Union more than half a century ago. TWX (yperiter Echange) was developed by AT&T in the 1950's when they decided to try and encroach on Western Union's territory. Both involved machines with modems which had keyboards and printers. An operator at one end typed on the keyboard and the resulting message printed out on the paper at the other end. It is true the term 'email' itself came into usage only about twenty years ago and into common usage during perhaps the past decade, but we have had the essence of email for a long time. Long before 'every business can have their own telegraph operator' as someone at WUTCO once commented during the Second World War era, every town large and small had a public telegraph office. These functioned as sort of community email places where operators sat at keyboards entering messages which came out on the printers of similar devices in distant cities. To be sure, we called them 'telegrams' rather than the modern term 'email' ... but it existed none the less. After AT&T began marketing TWX, they got sued by Western Union to force them out of the business with WUTCO claiming the voice traffic belonged to AT&T while the written traffic should be the exclusive property of WUTCO ... a court agreed and AT&T had to divest themselves of TWX. That was in the middle 1960's I guess. Those Western Union public offices were really something else. I'll print something about them here in the Digest soon. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V14 #373 ******************************