TELECOM Digest Fri, 14 Oct 94 12:41:00 CDT Volume 14 : Issue 397 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Calculating Cost of Cellular Call While Roaming (Bob Beck) Re: Calculating Cost of Cellular Call While Roaming (Robert Virzi) Re: Calculating Cost of Cellular Call While Roaming (Bob Keller) Re: "Cost of Call" Indication? (Pawel Dobrowolski) Re: "Cost of Call" Indication? (Olaf Seibert) Re: "Cost of Call" Indication? (Kaita Seikku) Re: 1-800-CALL-INFO (Jody Kravitz) Re: 1-800-CALL-INFO (Daryl Gibson) Re: MCI's 1-800-CALL-INFO (Brian Brown) Re: NANP Nightmare (Daniel E. Ganek) Re: NANP Nightmare (Joe Haggerty) Re: NYNEX to Stop Charging For Touch-Tone! (Russell E. Sorber) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 08:45:12 -0500 From: rab@vienna.ssds.com (Bob Beck) Subject: Re: Calculating Cost of Cellular Call While Roaming Over the summer I took my family on a two week trip from the Washington DC suburbs of Virginia to Denver and back. Since we were traveling with four kids, it was difficult to determine how far we could drive each day and be certain that we would get to a hotel/motel where reservations had been previously made. Hence we decided not to make reservations prior to departure and, instead, made reservations on the road using our cell phone in the van (which has a 703 area code) to locate overnight accomodations. Our route to/from Denver was primarily Interstate 70. I just received the bill from my service provider, Nationwide Cellular. For each "service area" where we used our cell phone there is a corresponding "service charge" of $3. In addition to the service charge, there are the local air time charges for that area, and associated state and local taxes. During the trip we received two calls. Each time it was a commercial announcement from the local service provider instructing "roamers" on how to contact authorities and encouraging you to use their system. After getting the bill, I see why. Bob Beck SSDS, Inc. 8150 Leesburg Pike, #1100 Vienna, VA 22182 703.827.0806 x152 703.827.0716 FAX ------------------------------ From: rv01@gte.com (Robert Virzi) Subject: Re: Calculating Cost of Cellular Call While Roaming Date: 14 Oct 1994 12:49:07 GMT Organization: GTE Laboratories, Waltham, MA In article , Sheldon W. Hoenig wrote: > My daughter and my wife are going to travel to a number of colleges in > the midwest in a few weeks so that my daughter can be interviewed for > grad school. When each interview is complete, my daughter wants to > call my wife on the cellular telephone so that my wife can pick her > up. The cellular telephone has a 703 area-code telephone number. If > the telephone is set for roaming in each city, what type of > call -- local or long distance -- will be charged to the cellular > telephone number and to my telephone credit card for the pay-phone > call that my daughter will make? > I assume that my daughter will dial the true cellular telephone number > which, of course, will be a long-distance telephone number. My understanding of this is that it depends, on how you roam. If you are using Follow-me-roaming (or one of its equivalents like automatic call delivery) two long distance charges will apply. (1) is your daughters call to 703. The other is a LD charge by your cellular company to forward your call from 703 to the area code your wife is in. A cheaper alternative is to use the roamer access port in the city your family is in. Your daughter would then make a local call to the access number, then enter your cellular phone number. You would not be charged a long distance call on the cellular side because the call isn't being fowarded from 703 to the traveling city. For this to work, you need to use the older variant of roaming, not FMR or ACD. You may also want to check on differences in daily roamer surcharges. In some circumstances (don't ask me to explain, its too obscure) it may be cheaper to use ACD because the roamer charges are less/dropped. Best thing to do is to call your cellular provider and ask about the rates for the various kinds of roaming in the specific cities of interest. If regular roaming is cheapest, be sure to get the roamer access numbers in those cities and give them to your daughter. Find out if you have to disable FMR/ACD when travelling to those cities. Not bad for someone that doesn't even have cellular service, huh? Bob Virzi rvirzi@gte.com +1(617)466-2881 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 10:14:39 EDT From: Bob Keller Reply-To: Bob Keller Subject: Re: Calculating Cost of Cellular Call While Roaming In TELECOM Digest V14 #396 Sheldon W. Hoenig inquired about roaming charges. From the message I gather that these calls would be placed by your daughter from a landline phone in the midwest to your wife on a 703 area code (VA) cellular unit roaming in the midwest. If that understanding is correct, the charges will most likely be as follows: Long Distance: If your daughter dials the 703 cellular number directly, she would incur a toll charge for a call from the midwest to 703, which means she will need a calling card, reversed charges, third party billing, or a bucket of quarters. In addition, since that call will be going into the cellular switch back in 703, your wife's cellular account will most likely get charged for a long distance call to route the call back from 703 to the midwest. One call, two LD charges ... such a deal! The way to avoid this is to find out the local roamer port number for the system where your wife will be at the time. Then, your daughter would call this number (which might even be a local number, depending on where she will be vis-a-vis the cellular system your wife is roaming on) and, when she hears the tone, dial in the 703 cellular number (sort of like the early days of competitive long distance carriers, or the current days of many calling card arrangements). The roam port number for most cellular carrier is AC + NXX + 7626, where AC + NXX is the area code and exchange assigned to most of the local cellular subs on the system, and 7626 is ROAM. There are exceptions, however, so you will have to check in advance. 2. Roaming Charges: No matter which calling method is used by your daughter, your wife will still incur cellular roaming charges. These range anywhere from merely usurious all the way up to $3 per day plus 99 cents per minute. (Depending on the arrangements, if any, between your wifes 703 carrier and the midwest system(s) where she will be roaming, you might get away for no daily surcharge and only 75 cents or 50 cents a minute, but don't hold your breath. Even if you decide to grin and bear it, you should still prepare yourself for sticker shock when the bill arrives (which, BTW, will be on the local 703 cellular bill, but will probably not show up until 1 or 2 billing cycles after the trip due to the lag time involved in the carriers clearing roaming data back and forth). In addition to a minute seeming a lot shorter when you are talking than it does when your are looking at the bill , you may be surprised to find multiple $3 surcharges on a single day. This will almost certainly be true if they will be moving any considerable distance in a single day. The daily surcharge applies to each system, and the cellular carrier's use their own logic in deciding that the area covered in a nearby county, even though it is otherwise integrated into the system serving the neighboring big city, is still considered a separate system for roaming purposes. I use my cellular phone constantly, regardless of where I am on the road, and it is darned convenient. But it sure as hell ain't cheap! I am fortunately in a line of work where the majority of my income is computed on the basis of an hourly billing rate, thus making the payment of even $3 per day and 99 cents per minute justifiable in most cases. But I honestly believe there is a HUGE number of potential roamer usage minutes out there that the cellular industry is losing even at no daily surcharge and 45 cents a minute. But, then again, if I knew only half as much about business as I thought I did, I guess I would not still be working for a living . Robert J. Keller, P.C. (Federal Telecommunications Law) Tel: 301-229-5208 Fax: 301-229-6875 4200 Wisconsin Ave NW #106-261 Washington DC 20016-2146 finger me for info on F.C.C. Daily Digests and Releases ------------------------------ From: dobrowol@fas.harvard.edu (Pawel Dobrowolski) Subject: Re: "Cost of Call" Indication? Date: 14 Oct 1994 14:41:17 GMT Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Its the same kind of thinking where online > commercial services are concerned: you never see a clock -- digital or > otherwise -- displayed right on your screen in front of you all the time > with the elapsed time and charges. You can ask for the detail of course Not entirely true. When I log onto Compuserve I get a clock that shows time since log in. And I am sure that if enough people threatened to leave Compuserve unless it started to show a number for total charges incurred in a single sesion they would give it to us. ------------------------------ From: rhialto@mbfys.kun.nl (Olaf Seibert) Subject: Re: "Cost of Call" Indication? Organization: University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 01:00:09 GMT In knop@duteca8.et.tudelft.nl (Peter Knoppers) writes: > For the technically inclined: > The cost pulse is a short AC common mode signal, about 60 Volts, about > 50 Hz. Duration of the pulse is about 0.5 seconds. Normal phones are > immune to common mode signals, therefore you should not be able to > hear it. To this I may add that this is going to be/has been changed. The new system uses 15 kHz tones, as I read somewhere. Personally I suspect this is being done to make old mechanical counters useless. Oh, the joys of a state monopoly going commercial, combining the worst of both worlds. Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert rhialto@mbfys.kun.nl Ooey-Gooey-Fluffy- Barfie ------------------------------ From: spk@proffa.cc.tut.fi (Kaita Seikku) Subject: Re: "Cost of Call" Indication? Date: 14 Oct 1994 09:15:46 GMT Organization: Tampere University of Technology, Computing Centre Sam Spens Clason (d92-sam@dront.nada.kth.se) wrote: > In oleh@eskimo.com (Ole Hellevik) writes: >> Lee Ziegenhals (lcz@dptspd.sat.datapoint.com) wrote: >>> I'm wondering whether there is any work being done on a real-time >>> display of the cost of a call. >> It has been available (for a quarterly fee) in Norway for as long as I >> can remember, a little box next to the phone with two counters, on >> resettable, one not, indicating number of 'periods' (One period always >> has the same price whether the call is local or LD, but the length in >> time would be different.) This box would receive a pulse from the >> local switch when you enter a period, and would in effect be parallell >> with a similar counter in the local exchange. > Same thing in neighbouring Sweden. Until a couple of years ago all > calls were measured in 0,29 krona units, just as in Norway. But > nowadays everything except local calls is either billed by the second > or has a fixed price-tag (calling a pager is 1,5 or 6 krona "flat > rate"). This applies to ~2/3 of the Swedish PSTN. I don't know if > the old unit measurers understands this kind of billing. This seems to be a chorus of Nordic people telling the U.S. guys they should get some REAL telecom equipment... ;-) -- Here in Finland the service has been available for tens of years, too. Unfortunately only if you order it. Techincal implementations is that subscriber lines are moved to a special register that repeats the charging events to the subscriber line as short pulses of 16 kHz tone, which are detected and counted by a small box at the subscribers end. internet : spk@proffa.cc.tut.fi voice-mail ->pager : +358 -40 498 0297 real life: Seikku P. Kaita phone (or FAX) : +358 -31 265 6865 visit at : Saastajankuja 4b32 TAMPERE On The Air : OH3NYB ^^ ^ ^ ..these four a's should have double dots above them, since they are front vowels (as in word 'that'). Isn't it a pity that in English the word GHOTI can be pronounced like word FISH. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Oct 94 00:12:41 PDT From: kravitz@foxtail.com (Jody Kravitz) Subject: Re: 1-800-CALL-INFO I saw the first ad for 1-800-CALL-INFO last night on TV. Just 75 cents/call, billed to the CALLING number. I called today and bugged both Pacfic Bell's "business services" office and MCI's "business services" office complaining about the erosion of 800 services into a "you can't count on it to be free so Hotels, Pay Phones, business PBX's, etc will have to block ALL calls to 800 numbers" and that I went on to complain that this would reduce the value of the 800 number I had planned on getting for my business. Neither gave me a particularly good answer, so this evening I tried some experiments. Calling from a COCOT near my house that has in the past worked remarkably "correctly", it allowed the call to go through. But the operator requested "how do you want this call billed ?" and insisted on a 3rd number billing or credit card (don't remember if she asked for a telco credit card or just credit card). I asked why she asked for a billing method and was told I was on a "restricted line". I explained what I was up to, thanked her, and told her that I had to find out how to restrict my business lines. I then went home and tried the same experiment from my unlisted business number. Call went through without a problem. I was prepared with a couple of really hard to look up numbers for them. With these searches I've determined that 1) they don't get numbers for 30-60 days after the telco's directory assistance gets them (by admission when asked), and 2) they don't deal very well with "slightly out-of-area" requests (I specified "in-or-near LA" for a company with a unique name which was actually located in Anaheim). I'm unimpressed with the service. I'm wondering how to "restrict" my phones. I'm also wondering if there are any interested parties in politically high places who might like an earful (or a long fax) about what I think about the degraded value of 800 service as a way to reach businesses. Comments? Jody [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I went out yesterday afternoon and tried it also to see what payphones around here would do. I got through and got the request to provide billing information in the form of a credit card number or third party phone number. When I asked why there was a charge for a call to an 800 number the answer I got was that the call itself is free; what I would be paying for was the information provided as a result. This is basically the answer all the information providers via 800 phrase their answer: carriage itself is indeed 'free' or reverse charged. You pay for the information we give you while chatting. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 13 Oct 1994 17:55:23 MST From: Daryl Gibson TELECOM Digest Editor queried: > I wonder if MCI is using any sort of legitimate data-base from the > local telcos or if they have strung together some sort of outdated > cross-reference books where half the entries are out of date and a > couple years old. {The Wall Street Journal} indicates they are getting their information from the Post Office, direct marketers, and credit card companies ... Daryl (801)378-2950 (801)489-6348 drg@du1.byu.edu 71171.2036@compuserve.com ------------------------------ From: bfbrown@teal.csn.org (Brian Brown) Subject: Re: MCI's 1-800-CALL-INFO Organization: Colorado SuperNet, Inc. Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 15:58:08 GMT FYI, a LD carrier can provide two "information" digits in addition to ANI via digital lines -- although, for some mysterious, unexplainable reason (someone comment please), they must do this via MF, not DTMF. The two-digit code for payphones is "27". In fact, MCI can look at the two ANI description digits before deciding to go off hook, and simply not answer the call. I would be interested to know what happens when you call from a payphone. Incidentally, the two MF digits make the ANI-DNIS string look like: *AABBBCCCDDDD*EEEFFFF*, a total of 22 digits outpulsed!!! Is it possible that MF can outpulse faster than DTMF? It seems strange that MF is necessary for this service, but it definitely is. You may be able to get some employee at a carrier to agree to give you this info via DTMF, but they will soon learn that they can't and apologize to you. One more thing -- these desription digits can also tell you when the ANI represents a hotel, hospital, prison, cellular, business or residential site, and who knows what else. By the way, phone sex companies have been charging on 800 #'s for quite a while. Just like with 900 numbers, though, it's actually pretty easy to get your bills for 900 or 800 numbers cleared by protesting them. And the companies who provide the billing for such operations will put you on their "bad ANI" list, which they distribute to the service providers, who are informed that anyone on that list will not be billed, so don't give them any "services". Please don't ask how I know all this. BB ------------------------------ From: ganek@apollo.hp.com (Daniel E. Ganek) Subject: Re: NANP Nightmare Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 14:25:25 GMT Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA In article vantek@sequoia.northcoast. com (Van Hefner) writes: > Boston Business Misses Phone Calls Due to Bungled Exchange > Oct. 8 -- Lori Moretti lives to hear the phone ring. But since she > recently moved her public relations firm to its new Boston locale near > Fort Point Channel, the lines have been unusually quiet. [ Story about a company losing business because of a new phobe exchange] > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: NYNEX cannot really be blamed because > the proprietors of some private phone systems at large companies, > universities, etc are klutzes. People wanted a telephone network where > everyone did thier own thing, so that's what they got now over ten > years ago. I used to work for a large department store downtown on a > part time basis trying to straighten out the mess that predecessors > had made of the Rolm PBX there. It was a mess! There were lots of [ etc. ] Question: Why do private systems require such programming at all? If I dial an unused exchange NYNEX tells me. Why don't private systems just put the call thru and let the CO handle it?? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They rarely 'require' such programming and can in fact be configured to just let everything past unchecked. The reason this is not often done is because the owner of the private system has no convenient method of collecting the charges from his users, so rather than lose large amounts of money from users who would otherwise get a free ride on his phone system, all sorts of obstacles are programmed into the switch to make 'unauthorized' calls difficult or impossible to complete. Where the problem comes in is that telco can't (usually) be counted on to refuse to complete calls with toll charges attached. Usually whatever protection the PBX has against fraud and misuse has to come as a result of the owner installing it. Deciding which outgoing calls are going to result in simply reaching a telco intercept and which are going to result in big $$ billed to the owner is difficult; thus the owner has to take on the burden of sorting it all out. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joe_Haggerty Subject: Re: NANP Nightmare Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 11:42:21 EDT Organization: News & Observer Public Access I agree that it's the businesses that are "slow" with the new NXXs, or sometimes they wait and only add new ones upon complaint. I was recently at the IBM office in Raleigh, NC and attempted to dial a local cellular number 919-801-xxxx. The calls went to a recording. The local switchboard operator couldn't help, and they were not allowed to connect me to an "outside" operator. But, they gave me the number of the techie that handles their PABXs. It was a local tie line number; this guy was somewhere in Texas. After explaining the problem to someone with the right knowledge, he had it fixed in time for the next break. Also, I worked for a telco in Virginia in the early '70s, and one night discovered that they had never put NPA 809 in their switch. No one could direct dial to 809, but nobody ever complained (or their complainets never reached the right people?) Joe Haggerty, Wake Forest, NC 27587-5900 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: There was a small town in Wisconsin which cut in a new exchange a few years ago which never made it into the tables at Illinois Bell for close to two years afterward. Placing the call as 1 + ten digits always sent me to a local telco intercept as did dialing the call 10-anything + 1 + ten digits. But get this: dialing through any carrier's 800 number then out of their switch -- in effect bypassing the local Illinois Bell network -- allowed the call to complete. Like many or perhaps all local telcos, IBT squats right there in the middle, watching every digit dialed and rejecting the call out of hand when they can't deal with it without bothering to ask the long distance carrier what to do. Telling repair service anything is like trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket. I finally got someone at AT&T who understood the problem, and got a call back from an AT&T guy in Denver, I think, who said he would deal with it. When I asked him his position with the company, he said his job was 'fighting with local telcos about stuff like this'. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 14 Oct 94 10:01:27 CDT From: sorbrrse@wildcat.cig.mot.com (Russell E. Sorber) Subject: Re: NYNEX to Stop Charging For Touch-Tone! Organization: Motorola Inc., Cellular Infrastructure Group In article Wes Leatherrock writes: > Quoting roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith): >> Am I the only person in the world who still doesn't have touch- tone, >> because I don't want to pay the extra $0.50/month, or whatever it is? > According to which figures you want to use, between 20 and 25 > per cent of all telephones in the United States are still rotary dial. The numbers also vary greatly by region of the US. According to a {Wall Street Journal} article about two months ago, NYNEX was far and away the winner in terms of percentage of customers using rotary dial (The story broke down the percent of rotary users by Baby Bell region). I think the number quoted in the WSJ was more than 30% of existing NYNEX customers using rotary, with about 10% of new subscribers refusing to pay for touch-tone service. Ameritech and the Illinois Commerce Commission also just announced a deal that, among other things, would eliminate Ameritech's monthly touch-tone surcharge for Illinois customers. Russ Sorber Software Contractor - Opinions are mine, Not Motorolas! Motorola, Cellular Division Arlington Hts., IL (708) 632-4047 ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V14 #397 ****************************