TELECOM Digest Fri, 7 Oct 94 16:11:00 CDT Volume 14 : Issue 392 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson 281 Overlay of NPA 713 (Was: Splits Pending) (A. Alan Toscano) Book Review: "Driving the Infohighway" by Neufeld (Rob Slade) Re: Pager For Kids (William H. Sohl) New Country Code: 995 Georgia (Greg Monti) BigMouth - Good or Bad? (Eugene Bylinin) WilTel Opens New Office In Cyberspace (Monty Solomon) Re: Can an Aussie Phone Work in US - Yes But No! (Mark Gabriele) Re: Cordless Phone Security (Boonkang@bcsc02.gov.bc.ca) Re: AT&T Lying, TV a Fake & Other Slander (Jon C. Russo) Re: Now AT&T is Lying About True-Voice (Henry Wertz) Re: Help CCITT 16kb/s LD-CELP G728 (H. Shrikumar) Re: Cordless Phone Security (Henry Wertz) 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: atoscano@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM (A Alan Toscano) Subject: 281 Overlay of NPA 713 (Was: Splits Pending) Date: 7 Oct 1994 13:14:55 -0500 Organization: NeoSoft Internet Services +1 713 684 5969 In article , Clive D.W. Feather wrote: > I have the following information on pending NANP area code splits. Can > anyone let me know any further information (I am only interested in > the first day of parallel running): > [...other splits deleted...] > 1995 ??? ?? 713 splits into 281 > In addition, are the details of the last split (713/281) known yet ? Area Code 281 will enter service on 3/1/95 as an overlay of Number Plan Area 713. For its first year, it will serve only wireless services, such as pager and cellular. Houstonians with 713 numbers will still dial seven digits to reach local 713 numbers but ten to reach local 281 numbers. (I have not learned what 281 cellular customers will dial to reach either 713 or 281 numbers, but my guess would be that they will dial ten digits for all local calls. I've made that guess based upon a provision of the NEXT paragraph.) Beginning 3/1/96, 281 will be opened up to non-wireless services as well as wireless. AT THAT TIME, HOUSTON CUSTOMERS WILL DIAL TEN DIGITS TO REACH ANY OTHER LOCAL NUMBER, REGARDLESS OF THE AREA CODES OF CALLING AND CALLED NUMBER. Needless to say, that part of the plan was not well recieved by the public. Just the same, I personally think it is the right way to go, and suspect that within ten years or so, will become the dominant method of local dialing throughout the NANP. A Alan Toscano -- P O Box 741982 -- Houston, TX 77274 -- 713 415-9262 or ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 07 Oct 1994 16:29:21 EST From: Rob Slade Subject: Book Review: "Driving the Infohighway" by Neufeld BKDRVINF.RVW 940812 New Fields Publishing Box 14, R.R. 3 Brandon MB R7A 5Y3 (204) 729-8943 "Driving the Infohighway", Neufeld, 1994, 0-920436-54-4, C$24.95 Neufeld@BrandonU.CA Neufeld's book is an institution-specific (in this case, Brandon University) guide to the Internet. As such, it is not, strictly speaking, suitable as a general Internet guide. There are, however, some compelling reasons for those outside of Brandon to be interested in it. For one thing, it is excellent, and Neufeld is willing to take on projects for other institutions. For another, it demonstrates what can be done in a non-UNIX and non-workstation environment (VAX/VMS). Finally, even having to weed out the Internet stuff from the Brandon material, it does make for a very decent Internet guide. After an initial introduction to the Internet, three chapters deal with access topics specific to Brandon University, while the fifth gives new users some orientation to the VAX. Chapter six starts the Internet "how to" with email. One aspect of the book is the seamless integration of the site-specific information to the Internet content. Thus, this, the subsequent chapters on Usenet, archie, ftp, file transfer, file archiving, telnet, chat (using PHONE, talk and IRC), advanced email, mailing lists, finding email addresses, gopher, WAIS, and World Wide Web might be difficult for a non-Brandon user to disentangle, but must provide a terrific introduction for BU users. Chapter twenty closes with a look at the growth and future of the Internet. Appendices give a glossary and some (mostly gopher) resources, plus more details on VAX topics. While there are occasional problems (I noticed one file specification which actually points to a directory, in one important resource), the material is generally of superior quality and arrangement. I have reviewed a number of more costly and supposedly more generic books which give far less than this value and content. If you want a site-specific manual, get Neufeld to do it for you. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKDRVINF.RVW 940812. Distribution permitted in TELECOM Digest and associated mailing lists/newsgroups. 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" (Oct. '94) Springer- Verlag ------------------------------ From: whs70@cc.bellcore.com (sohl,william h) Subject: Re: Pager For Kids Date: 7 Oct 1994 15:17:45 -0400 Organization: Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) In article , David Esan wrote: > My children are now of the age that they are beginning to disappear > into the various backyards of their friends in suburbia. > Can a person set up a paging system like this (say a one mile range) or > would I have to contact a real company and pay big $$? Actually, many pagers aren't all that expensive on a monthly basis, you might want to check some of the company's offerings. One note of caution, at least one state (New Jersey) has made it illegal for minors to have pagers. The alleged reason is to prevent drug dealers from using minors as drug runners because minors draw lower jail sentances if caught. Nothing like NJ punishing the many for the ill deeds of the few. Just to be sure there's no doubt as to where I stand, I live in NJ, I detest drugs, drug dealers and drug users. I also detest stupid legislation that outlaws the legitamate use of technology just to keep it out of the hands of criminals ... and we all know the criminals don't care anyway. Bill Sohl (K2UNK) BELLCORE (Bell Communications Research, Inc.) Morristown, NJ email via UUCP bcr!cc!whs70 201-829-2879 Weekdays email via Internet whs70@cc.bellcore.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, you could always live in Chicago where stupidity reigns supreme where our city council is concerned. Talk about dumb laws ... they got dumb laws in Chicago with pay phones. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Oct 1994 14:34:59 EDT From: Greg Monti Subject: New Country Code: 995 Georgia Sprint has announced direct dial service to the (former Soviet) Republic of Georgia. Georgia now has a country code separate from the Commonwealth of Independent States. Georgia's is 995. 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 ------------------------------ From: lerusse@aol.com (LeRusse) Subject: BigMouth - Good or Bad? Date: 7 Oct 1994 15:28:01 -0400 Organization: America Online, Inc. (1-800-827-6364) Hi! I just found some information on telemarketing system called BigMouth from Talking Tech. in CA. , at $295 plus $90 for "targeted" outbound-call telemarketing extension. If you are familiar with that system (or have used another exeptionally good/bad system), I would very much appreciate your comments/impressions/thoughts/suggestions. Eugene Bylinin ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 6 Oct 1994 05:00:53 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: WilTel Opens New Office In Cyberspace Forwarded FYI to the Digest: From: David_Cordeiro@wiltel.com (David Cordeiro) Subject: WilTel Opens New Office In Cyberspace Date: 30 Sep 1994 14:35:32 GMT Organization: WilTel For Immediate Release WilTel Opens New Office in Cyberspace WilTel, the pioneer in commercial data telecommunications, has become the first company in Oklahoma to put a commercial WWW server on the Internet. This is a natural move for WilTel, says Russ McGuire, the initiator of WilTel's Internet server. Our server puts us one step closer to our Internet-using customers and opens WilTel up to a huge potential client base. WilTel's server offers information on the company as well as detailed information about all of its telecommunications products. In keeping with WilTel's corporate values, other services are also planned to add value to the Internet community and WilTel's home city of Tulsa, OK. Gordon Martin, WilTel's director of product marketing, believes this project puts WilTel on the leading edge of high-tech marketing. This is exactly where we need to be. Our leading-edge products and services are perfectly matched to this leading- edge media, he says. As future Internet technologies develop, WilTel is committed to remaining on the cutting edge of this exciting frontier. WilTel's server can be reached by Internet users at the Universal Resource Locator (URL) -- http://www.wiltel.com/ Contact: David Cordeiro David_Cordeiro@wiltel.com ------------------------------ From: gabriele@rand.org (Mark Gabriele) Subject: Re: Can an Aussie Phone Work in US - Yes But No! Date: Thu, 06 Oct 1994 17:15:17 -0800 Organization: The RAND Corporation In article , gkm@uow.edu.au (Glen K Moore) wrote: > No. I never got my phone hooked up. I gave up after two weeks and I > survived with the email -- it asked no questions and cost me a lot less > $$ and frustration. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well it would seem to me that by using > your MasterCard as payment, the requirments for a credit history might > have been waived under the circumstances. You did offer to pay that > way I assume, and allow the carrier to place a hold on perhaps several > hundred dollars of that credit line during your stay here ... Perhaps > I assume wrong. Any ideas from other readers? PAT] I can give a true-life experience ... when I got my cellphone hooked up, I declined to provide a Social Security number so that they could do a credit check. They stated that there would be a deposit required -- $1000 (this was AirTouch cellular in LA, formerly PacTel Cellular). When I pointed out that there was also a space on the application form for a passport number and offered to provide that to them, the rep (who seemed to know his business) assured me that it would be acceptable, as long as I also gave them a $1000 deposit. There is apparently no exception -- if you want cellular service (at least in LA) and don't a credit check, they want a deposit to hold for one year until you have established credit with them. This makes some sense, really. Since cellphones are inherently mobile, what is to prevent an unscrupulous person from providing a false address and charging up a storm, then calling up their credit card company amd disputing the charges? I sympathize about the failure of a letter from the university finance officer, but such a thing could, of course, be trivially faked, and the fact that it comes from a university on the other side of the planet makes it non-trivial to check up on. Mark (gabriele@rand.org) ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Cordless Phone Security From: BOONKANG@bcsc02.gov.bc.ca Date: Fri, 07 Oct 94 13:22:56 PDT Organization: BC Systems Corporation In article BOONKANG@bcsc02.gov.bc.ca writes: > I seem to have read somewhere about the risk of having someone dialing > up on your phone line (and charging long distance calls on your phone > account) when the handset is not sitting at the base-station cradle of > your cordless phone. Can those experts on cordless phones provide me > with an update on this issue? I received responses from my above posting. They all expressed the awareness of such security exposure but none offered any concrete case of expoesure or any technical explanation. Last week, I saw a new 900 mhz cordless phone (Sanyo ?) which claimed the feature of 1 million security codes to prevent un-authorized use. My own cordless phone (Cobra) features an 8-bit security code (= 256 combinations). I take this to mean that these cordless phone will check the matching codes between the handset and base machine before transmitting the data between them. Since my phone has only 256 combinations, it is relative easy to use a gadget to crack the security code of my phone and obtain a dialup on it. Is my observation correct ? Anyway, I also found a partial solution for this potential security problem: Radio Shack sells a device called Phone-lock which will prevent dialout when locked. It will still allow receiving of phone-call. You have to turn the key to unlock the phone if you want to dial out, this is not necessarily a problem because we can use other corded phones to dial out. B.C. Systems Corp. ||PROFS: BCSC02(BOONKANG) 4000 Seymour Pl, W169BLUE ||INTERNET:BOONKANG@BCSC02.GOV.BC.CA Victoria,B.C. Canada V8X 4S8||IBMMAIL: CABCSTFS@IBMMAIL.COM 604 389-3991(V)389-3916(FAX)||*** Opinions are MINE solely * ------------------------------ From: jrusso@hannibal.atl.ge.com (Jon C Russo) Subject: Re: AT&T Lying, TV a Fake & Other Slander Date: 7 Oct 1994 13:07:09 GMT Organization: GE Aerospace, Advanced Technology Labs > For a real comparison, the TrueVoice demo line can be reached by > dialing 1-800-932-2000. Calls to this number are processed by the > same piece of equipment that provides TrueVoice in the network, so > what a caller hears IS the real TrueVoice. (The voice on the demo is > that of James Naughton.) I was just wondering what this "piece of equipment" was the provides the TrueVoice effect. I have obtained similar harmonic modification On the side of AT&T: Marketing's job is to make impressive presentations. I surmise that, in marketting "True Voice", AT&T did not target net-hangers, scientists, and engineers. The were targetting (certain, but not all) politicians, lawyers, and artists. (This is a joke, so don't come after me. In fact, I disclaim this whole message.) What would be really cool is a phone with a built in graphic equalizer. Hell, I want do talk to my girlfriend in full Dolby (TM) surround sound! It's time to bring out phone for audiofiles! Give me a T1 and a phased array handpiece! Jon C. Russo e-mail: jrusso@atl.ge.com Martin Marietta Corporation phone: (609) 866-6546 Advanced Technology Laboratories dial comm: 8*777-6546 Building 145-2 FAX: (609) 866-6397 Moorestown, NJ 08057 ------------------------------ From: Henry Wertz Subject: Re: Now AT&T is Lying About True-Voice Date: 7 Oct 1994 17:53:15 GMT Organization: U of Iowa Panda System Reply-To: Henry@chop.isca.uiowa.edu In note , david@uslink.net (David Adams) writes: > Nick Sayer (nsayer@quack.kfu.com) wrote: >> AT&T's latest "True Fraud^H^H^H^H^HVoice" ad has reached a new low in >> deceptive practices. The add features a rediculous sort of "control >> room" full of CRTs showing silly waterfall displays of a lady singing >> their "True Voice" song, though the audio of her singing is quite low >> in level and has the bass attenuated slightly. This is supposed to be >> characteristic of a telephone call. Of course, they also sit there cheering as though they "discovered" something new and great, even though it was developed by for (or was it by?) Bellcore in the 1950's, and just not implemented for 40 years. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 7 Oct 1994 13:57:56 -0400 From: H. Shrikumar Subject: Re: Help CCITT 16kb/s LD-CELP G728 Organization: UMass, Amherst MA + Temporal Systems Bombay India In article is written: > I am looking document and sample source code for CCITT 16kb/s LD- CELP > G728. There is an implementation of the GSM 13kbps standard. Here is a pointer ftp://tub.cs.tu-berlin.de:/pub/tubmik/gsm-1.0.tar.Z European GSM 06.10 provisional standard for full-rate speech transcoding, prI-ETS 300 036, which uses RPE/LTP (residual pulse excitation/long term prediction) coding at 13 kbit/s. This implementation however pads frames to octet boundaries, a small overhead, so it clocks 1650 Bytes/sec. I have not been able to access that site, but archie did show up other sites that had it. I tried it out, works quite ok. Very intelligible, speaker recognizable. And if you are careful, you can notice the very slight "sloshed" feel any vocoder/CELP type compressor gives to plosives in the voice. It works better than real-time on my better MIPS DECstation, but just a bit less than real time on a lesser endowed DECstation. I would like to carry voice over 14.4 (aka an ubiqutous Internet drop, from you friendly neighbourhood ISP :-), and would like to use 286 class machines to do the codec. The only solution I have right now is a CVSS style ADPCM that I threw together one evening, starting from first principles. It works OK, sounds like a scratchy shortwave SSB channel, (without the donald-duck effect of course, so I would be more precise if I said HF-AM ... but you know what I mean.) but hey it works at 14.4 kbps even on my hp100lx, uses hardware consisting of some 8 resistors and a couple of opamps ... so I wont complain :-) Does someone have an old Mitel handbook around ? I know Mitel had a CVSS chip. If I could get a table of coefficients that I could use to improve my ADPCM quantiser, I would be much obliged ! If someone has pointers to a better one, (perhaps the G.726 16kbps 2bit ADPCM, which I suspect should run both Coder and Decoder in real-time on a 12 MHz 286), please do drop a pointer ! There is the G.721-G.723 ITU-T reference implementation from Sun, but that does only 32 and 24 kbps. The 16kbps seems sufficiently different from its higher speed cousins, from my readings of the G.726 standards, I think it would take more than one evening to hack the Sun implementation to do the 16kbps. (Note of course, I am talking about the 16kbps G.726 ADPCM, and not the 16kbps LD/CELP ... that one is a bigger cookie in itself! ) Thanks, shrikumar ( shri@cs.umass.edu, shri@shakti.ncst.ernet.in, X.400 G=Shrikumar S=Hariharasubrahmanian P=itu A=arcom C=CH (yea right :) ------------------------------ From: Henry Wertz Subject: Re: Cordless Phone Security Date: 7 Oct 1994 18:41:10 GMT Organization: U of Iowa Panda System Reply-To: Henry@chop.isca.uiowa.edu In note , BOONKANG@bcsc02.gov.bc.ca writes: > I seem to have read somewhere about the risk of having someone dialing > up on your phone line (and charging long distance calls on your phone > account) when the handset is not sitting at the base-station cradle of > your cordless phone. Can those experts on cordless phones provide me > with an update on this issue? All the portable phones I have seen have at an at least 8-bit, and sometimes up to 16-bit code or more. (That is a minimum of 256 possibilites, and up to 4096+..) One older one I used had it on DIP-switches on back, and lots you just hang it up, and press a button for a second or two and it sets it. I really don't thing people getting on your line and dialing out is a problem anymore. The big problem is people listening in. Before my mom was just about to order something on the phone. It's like broadcasting a for 1/5th of a mile, and she's sitting there saying "my credit card number is ..." Great. I'm glad we don't have anything here but three year olds and 80 year-olds, or that could have caused a problem 8-). ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V14 #392 ****************************