From telecom-request@delta.eecs.nwu.edu Fri Aug 18 10:32:49 1995 by 1995 10:32:49 -0400 telecomlist-outbound; Thu, 17 Aug 1995 21:49:03 -0500 1995 21:49:00 -0500 To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu TELECOM Digest Thu, 17 Aug 95 21:49:00 CDT Volume 15 : Issue 349 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Telecom and the End of WW-2 (Patrick Townson) Re: PacBell's New Network (Bradley Ward Allen) X.25 Access Providers (Adam Feinberg) Re: Rural Fibre (Mark Williston) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and America On Line. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available to qualified organizations and individual readers. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The first couple weeks in August saw numerous stories in the media relating to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. There was a great deal of discussion about the use of 'the bomb' to bring an end to it all, both pro and con. Surely President Harry S Truman (known back then at times as 'give em hell Harry' will be remembered for his decision well into the next century if not longer. --------------------------------------------- "Mrs. Brown, what does the 'S' in President Truman's middle name stand for?" asked the one child of his teacher in that second grade classroom during the current events period that winter day in 1948 following Truman's election. Mrs. Brown started to explain that the /S/ was a 'stand-alone'; that is, that the single letter /S/ was his middle name and that therefore, when writing his name the use of a dot or 'period mark' following the S was inappropriate. It was not an abb- reviation of his middle name, it *was* his middle name. As she patiently explained all this, one child best left unnamed raised his hand to say, "My father says the 'S' stands for Shit!". Mrs. Brown tried hard to keep a straight face and keep from smirking. -------------------------------------------- In the initial stages of the exploration of nuclear power -- for all its wonderfulness, for all its awfulness -- much of the work was done here in the Chicago area at the University of Chicago. Living as I did in the 1960's in the Hyde Park neighborhood and a matter of just two or three blocks from the site where the first nuclear reaction was sustained on that winter day in 1942, I was reminded of it whenever I walked past the site and the commemorative placque installed there. Now the University library; then the underside of the grandstand to Stagg Field. Living as I did at the Windermere Apartment Hotel, 56th and Stony Island Avenue, (FAIrfax-6000 for the switchboard, although most of the tenants including myself had our own private lines in addition to an extension on the hotel board; mine was HYDe Park 3714) I was very privil- eged to be a nearby neighbor of Laura Fermi, the widow of Enrico Fermi. She often took her dinner in the Anchorage, which was the name of the hotel dining room as did I, and she told a story once which I hope will interest you as it did when she told it to me. Her words from this point forward unless otherwise indicated: In July, 1945 as the work neared completion, a great deal of final research was being done, and a test explosion was planned for an early morning in what is now the White Sands Missle Range area in New Mexico. Enrico and several other scientists planned to be present to observe the test, take measurements and other things. Actually, the scientists and researchers were stationed over a fifty mile or so area around the circumference of White Sands. Since Enrico had some equipment to take along when we left home, we decided to make the trip to Alamogordo by automobile, and it was a very hot, very dusty two day trip for us, but we arrived in Alamogordo in mid-afternoon the day before the test. The heat was, for me at least, incredible. The temperature skirted around between 95 and 105 degrees all that summer there, we were told later by people who had been on location for as much as month before the day of the test. The temperature at night would drop to the upper seventies or lower eighties perhaps by 3 am ... and the sun would rise at a little before 5 am so that by midday the oppressive heat would return. After checking into our hotel -- the only one in Alamogordo, then a town of a few thousand people -- we ate and went to bed since we had to get an early start. About 3 am the next morning we arose, and collected our gear to get to the test site. All this was very hush- hush, we were all warned against saying anything at all to the local people about the purpose of our visit. Enrico had been assigned to a place about five miles outside of town and we got out there about 3:45 am. The test was scheduled for 4:30 am, but at about 4:15 am it started raining. Raining hard too; they told me later it was the first rain in the area all summer. The rain lasted about fifteen minutes then stopped as suddenly as it had started. The thing we immediatly noticed was the wonderful relief from the heat, as the temperature had apparently dropped into the middle sixties as a result. Well, 4:30 came ... no explosion. 4:35, then 4:40 ... just silence and darkness across the desert as the sun started to rise. Enrico was concerned that the test had not come off as scheduled, and he wondered out loud if it might have been cancelled due to the rain. We had no radio gear or other method of contacting the other people in the area, and Enrico decided we should return to town and look for a telephone to use to call the others and find out what was happening. We got back into town at right about 5 am. The only thing open at that time of night was the hotel where we were staying and Enrico told me to wait in the car while he went in to make a call on the pay station there. He returned two or three minutes later to say that the phone was not working and that he had been unable to raise the operator. He told me to start driving the car, and while I was driving, he was looking out of the car window, glancing at the telephone poles and the overhead wires. He would say 'turn left here' and I would drive down one street, then he would say 'turn right' and I would go down another street. As we drove down one street, I saw several houses as you would expect to find anywhere, but one in particular was different. From all direc- tions there were telephone poles around this house, in the front yard and the back yard. The wires from the poles all came down and were connected to some sort of a metal pipe or pole on the side of the house; there were hundreds of wires there and they all then went in through a hole into the side of the house. Enrico said to park the car and I did. We got out and walked up to the front porch of this house. The front porch light was burning, and the front door was open, but the screen door on the front was closed and latched from the inside. We looked inside and I saw a telephone switchboard in one corner of the room. Several lights on it were blinking on and off, with people trying to reach the operator. Across the room from that was a sofa with an end table, a lamp and a radio. The radio was playing soft music, and the lamp was on. A fan was also there, turned on blowing the air around. On the sofa lay a woman sound asleep. She looked like a young woman about 18 or 19 years old. Enrico banged on the screen door a couple times and rattled it rather loudly. All of a sudden the woman opened her eyes and looked at us standing there. She turned and looked at the switchboard with all the lights blinking. Then she turned and looked at us again. "Oh, my God!" she said excitedly. Pausing long enough to put a cigarette in her mouth and light it, she rushed over and sat down at the board and started frantically taking calls as fast as she could. Enrico and I walked back to the car and he drove immediatly out to the test site and our assigned station. We got back to our spot at about 5:30 or a few minutes after that, and we had only been there a minute or less than two minutes when the test was conducted. To this day now twenty five years later (PAT note: this was said in 1970) I have never seen anything as spectacular as that morning in the New Mexico desert. When we met with other scientists later that day we found out what had happened. Although the test and the people involved were scattered over a range of about fifty miles, all the communications between them were routed through Alamogordo. The switchboard there was used to connect everyone involved. Since everything was very top secret, I guess they saw no reason to tell the telephone operator what they would be doing, and obviously she did not not know. Normally I doubt she handled more than two or three calls during the entire night, and I know what happened in this case: the weather like it was, no one who worked a night shift was able to sleep during the day from the heat, and then when you were at work the temperature would cool off enough that you could sleep, just a little even though you were not supposed to sleep; you were supposed to be working. The poor lady probably had not slept much for a couple days, then laying there on that sofa reading or whatever between calls finally caught up with her. I doubt to this day that the lady is aware that her falling asleep at the switchboard caused the first atomic explosion in the world to be delayed by an hour and several minutes beyond its scheduled time. (end) ------------------------------------ With dinner over and more coffee and after dinner liqueurs than anyone should have, I left the Anchorage Windermere dining room and went back upstairs to my apartment thinking of the time several years before that I had walked over to the old Illinois Bell central office at 61st and Kenwood about 1959-60. The entire first floor was given over to the crossbars and frames with the telephone operators occupying the second floor. Hot as blazes that evening also, all the windows were open at 'Kenwood Bell' as they had not gotten around to air conditioning the place. Very few large companies or offices were air conditioned in those years, we just had ceiling fans -- many of them -- around the room. When all the windows were open at Kenwood Bell, as they were apt to be on a hot summer night, you could hear those switches a block away. And when you walked past outside on the sidewalk, all you heard was a constant chatter as the switches did their duty. That night also it rained, and as the rain started and I darted into a doorway for shelter, looking across the street at the central office I saw one of the operators get up from the board, walk over and put first her hand out the window, and then her head looking up. She felt the rain coming down and began going around the room closing all the windows. On the first floor, a man was doing the same. You had to close all the windows to keep the dampness from affecting the switchboard, but little comfort that was to the people who were sweltering inside. I thought Laura Fermi's account of (what is now) fifty years and a month ago at White Sands might be of interest to the historians here. PAT ------------------------------ key) In Steve Cogorno wrote: > [...] THe new network is fiber optic to each neighborhood and then > coax into each home. [...] According to PacBell, the target date > for city-wide deployment is Summer 1996 (IMHO pretty fast for a city > [San Jose] of 800,000 residents). [pp] Video services will be > availible by that time, and by the end of 1996, PacBell will abandon > it's regular copper network It seems Pacific Bell will definately have a corner, literally, on that market! Yay, it only took a decade! But on a more emotional note, I wonder how long it will take Manhattan to get to this stage; this prompts feelings of my rerooting in more progressive markets once again (not *that* feeling again). I think right now and for some time into the future, New York City will be as it has always been with most things in this city as I've seen it; rather than basically free market and a large amount of affordable useful merchandise, everything will be either welfare-quality or high cost and whatever you can afford and/or whatever you can intimidate someone into getting for you. Well, perhaps there's hope: yesterday, one of the three POTS lines I ordered via MFS two or three months ago was put to service! {It should be noted that the line turned on with MFS was previously a NYNEX line in service, and I now have two phone numbers for the same line (one as the number it was before and one new MFS number); the other two lines are pending NYNEX's installation into my unit, which is pending what the NYNEX person told me I have to do which is to get a *written* letter from my landlord (who incidentally hardly knows my language and hardly knows what an electron is, much less why someone would want to have more than one phone line) stating that it is OK to install the new line from the basement to my unit and where; the NYNEX installer mentioned possibilities of historic building designation codes as being possible slow-ups, which I find rediculous in this welfare-hotel- quality gutted building, so I'll have to find out and see}. Wow, competition from a competitor that has lower customer service and is under the thumb of its own competitor (all lines MFS uses are NYNEX's up to the NYNEX facility, where MFS then colocates equipment with NYNEX; the only things MFS are the equipment at the facility and the connections between the MFS equipments where such calls are routed). Really, though, this is a pinkynail hold on a relatively new development in the market, and I can only see this as a first step to increased competition and eventual quality of service. At some point, one daydreams, MFS will note the number of customers in certain neighborhoods to be large enough to run their own lines, *hopefully* not just traditional (as in century old technology) copper (hint hint, something thunder and lightning won't be attracted to, not that this matters in Manhattan where everything is underground). Actually, my hinting plead brings up a question; while I understand the bandwidth topology and hierarchy, I don't understand why fiber wasn't used for the very end of the link as well in the Pacific Bell installations? Are fiber cable, tools, and connection equipment still more expensive than coax cable? Don't lots of businesses use fiber to their computers in networks these days? I'm a bit confused. - More on MFS Intelenet - So far all the interactions have been very curteous, I haven't been put into too many circular impossibilites, and the employees really do seem to be working hard. I have programmed myself into using the computer-data line for all my outbound calls while the modem's off. Suddenly I get a call on that line causing me to wonder whether I was going insane because I had it call-forwarded, and it was an MFS tech checking to make sure the line was working. I was duly excited and the MFS tech answered my procedural questions very nicely (I was asking him what I have to do and was it necessary for me to brain-pick him, and he basically answered with the appropriate thing for each question with answers such as my new MFS number, no, wait, contact landord, and contact salesperson in a way that seemed quite logical to me). Anyway, today as I used the phone for lots of outbound calls, I didn't ever encounter any problems, and afterwards I realized that I had been using a new carrier. Problems: * I get either fast busy or a recording announcing that I've done something wrong when I dial these beginning combinations: *70; *77; *67; *87; *66; *69; 101; 10XXX other than 10440; 1900; 550. Yes, that's right, I can't use my selected long distance carrier via 10555 (in my case); I must use MFS. * CID is not passed consistently. It works when: I dial direct to a NYNEX line with CID. It does not work when I call to a NYNEX line forwarded to the MFS line forwarded to a NYNEX line (forwarding NYNEX lines does preserve CID). My WilTel/LDDS/WorldCom 800 number which normally either gives ANI information for out-of-service-area calls and CID information for in-service-area calls via CID always gives OOA for my calls from my MFS line; I'm guessing that MFS is in the service area so is consistent with Wiltel/LDDS/WorldCom's silly behavoir of only doing ANI->CID on out-of-service-area calls, and furthermore ·_ whatever path the long distance call MFS->WilTel/LDDS/Worldcom->NYNEX takes discards the CID data much as the calls from MFS->NYNEX->MFS- >NYNEX do (as opposed to the MFS->NYNEX calls). I have not tested calling NYNEX->MFS->NYNEX, nor do I have CID on my MFS line (yet? do they offer this? They said they do). Some of this forwarding was via my Call Forwarding features, and some via the forwarding NYNEX does for my old phone number to my new MFS line (i.e. one NYNEX number and one MFS number, with the MFS number being the "real" number). Random things: * 10440 is the MFS LD code, and it doesn't work from NYNEX, only from MFS (silly since MFS doesn't accept any other code, I tried 10288, 10222, 10333, 10555). * 1-700-555-4141 works as expected (properly to my knowledge). * 958 gives the number of MFS line with equivilent tones, clickings and voices as NYNEX 958 with exception at the end of the announcement where MFS omits a few fast busy signals (I guess MFS added this feature at the request of NYNEX which commonly uses 958 on lots of lines while poking in boxes). * 1-800-MY-ANI-IS gives the same number as 958. (No surprise.) * 72#0114122733XXXX# behaves just the same as local and domestic calls; I can forward my 800 number to an international number! Not remotely, though. (NYNEX doesn't work this way.) * Dialing 1 plus any area code works for that area code, including the same area code, in this case 212; in other words, when using MFS lines you can just nevermind where you're at, a useful feature. (NYNEX doesn't work this way.) * Long distance calls complete quicker than most other long distance companies during the evening and night. During the day they're pretty slow. 800 numbers all complete very slowly, probably all going through some common bottlenecking procedure. My sales rep has yet to call me to finish necessary details, so perhaps many issues here will be enhanced and worked out properly. Customer Service told me the sales rep has the final information, but that what she has on my account for right now is a 15.5 cents per minute rate at all times for long distance intra and inter state. They aren't able to tell me what the cost of local calls are (15.5 cents per minute? free? A dollar a piece? Who knows? Hopefully no nasty surprises when the bill comes!) I really hope MFS offers no-answer-call-forwarding too since NYNEX doesn't. Further information when I get it ... ------------------------------ I am looking for an X.25 service provider that has nodes in New York City and worldwide. Adam ------------------------------ On Mon, 14 Aug 95 15:58:17 EDT, Tony Harminc wrote: > I've just spent a vacation week in rural Ontario (Haliburton area), > and was astonished at the amount of aerial fibre I saw. I found > myself watching the poles rather than the road each time we drove > through a new area, and sure enough those orange tagged loops were > almost everywhere. Questions: By loops, do you mean cable going from poles to houses, or pole to pole. Pole to pole, with orange tags, sometimes blue or even a spiral of orange plastic wrapped around it are generally trunk fibers feeding an CO, OPM, WIC or DMS Urban. Fiber loops to houses are not very common yet and are rare. > What is the significance of the orange tags? I had assumed they just > marked the cable as fibre rather than copper, so the field people > would know not to yank too hard on it. But then I noticed that some > areas had blue tags. What do they signify? They are there, as you state, for us cable splicers or line men to make us aware that that cable is fiber. We have to call Repair or whatever number is stamped on the tag before we move them. A fiber break could cause many custormers to loose service. > What is the equipment found every 15-20 km? Typically there is a little > fenced compound with a couple of cabinets beside the road, supplied with > 120V power. Just repeaters? As far as I could see, the copper cable > did not enter the compound, so it presumably was not an SLC type of thing. If you looked around further, you would see copper cables sprouting from the ground and up a pole somewhere. Unless this is a long distance fiber which would need reconditioning after a measured distance. > How many strands are typically in one of these aerial cables, and what > data rate do they run at? Fiber cables can carry a lot of fibers or very few. Its hard to tell by the looks of the external cable itself. (There goes my copper splicing job! USA here I come!) :) > What is the topology of these fibre networks? It looked as though the > fibre runs were simply interoffice trunking, that is each little town > big enough to have its own CO/wire centre was connected to each > neighbouring little town/village. But I don't see how this explains > the easy availability of phone lines, e.g. the people next door to the > cottage we rented had no trouble getting two business lines and one > residential line, even though they are in an area where 6 and 8 party > lines were the norm not too many years ago. This was at the end of a > little gravel road by the lake in the middle of nowhere, around 10 km > from the CO in the village. They told me that an Internet provider is > promising service in a couple of months. Most telcos in Canada have been trying to get rid of party-lines all together as quick as possible lately. I think here in Nova Scotia, we may have one or two communities left to convert. As we kill the gosip lines, we are placing enough copper to facilitate a modern network which would explain why the availability of lines in that area. > How do they install the fibre -- it seems to be bound to the existing > copper cable with a spiral wrap. Is there a sort of giant sewing- machine- > on-a-truck that just cruises along the road wrapping a huge bobbin of > nylon around the whole bundle ? Or do they typically replace the > copper at the same time ? Fiber is placed basically the same way copper is placed. We use a machine called a Lasher. It has lashing wire spools loaded in it and as it is pulled along, it rotates the spools, lashing the cable to the strand. Most copper cables that are replaced by fiber are transformed from toll to be used as local cables feeding residences. Unless they are old and or defective beyond reuse. I start my tan in Jamaica every spring and finish it off all summer long on top of telephone poles. No shade up there at all except for cloudy days. I hate lightning storms real bad! ]\/[ark ]/\[illiston - Freelance Games & Graphics Programmer Author of: Two Bit Poker, Lucky Sevens & Ringing Bells. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V15 #349 ******************************