TELECOM Digest Mon, 12 Oct 92 23:00:20 CDT Volume 12 : Issue 775 Index To This Issue: Moderator: Patrick A. Townson Re: College Phone System (Steve Forrette) Re: College Phone System (Jeff Dubin) Re: College Phone System AGAIN! (Bob Kupiec) Re: College Phone System (Bob Clements) Re: College Phone System (Carl Moore) Re: GTE Addresses On Outgoing Email (Bob Frankston) Re: GTE Addresses On Outgoing Email (Ed Greenberg) Re: GTE Addresses On Outgoing Email (Steve Forrette) Re: Retail Videoconferencing? (Bruce Taylor, IV) Re: Retail Videoconferencing? (Sandy Kyrish) Re: Question About ROLM PBX Telephones (Martin McCormick) Re: Question About ROLM PBX Telephones (Lars Poulsen) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: stevef@wrq.com (Steve Forrette) Subject: Re: College Phone System Organization: Walker Richer & Quinn, Inc., Seattle, WA Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 17:40:29 GMT In article mmt@redbrick.com (Maxime Taksar) writes: >> combinations like 9-411, 9-611 and 9-911? > Please don't try this just as an experiment! Most of us know that it > is in bad form to call 911 "just to make sure it works," but not > everyone would know this. I once had an occasion where I needed to test 911. I called the non-emergency number for the answering agency and explained my situation. They said that a test would be fine as long as I called the non-emergency number first to let them know that I would be testing. This was in a smaller town where it was likely that the same person would answer all of the calls, though. Steve Forrette, stevef@wrq.com ------------------------------ Organization: The American University - University Computing Center Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 15:19:36 EDT From: Jeff Dubin Subject: Re: College Phone System A) Thanks for all of your responses! B) No, I didn't try 0-911. Actually, to call 411, you have to enter the access code to your account. It costs something like $.65! C) Apparently, someone passed a hard copy of that message to the director of telecommunications here at AU, who in turn called me to answer my questions. Turns out that having however many students live on campus dialing wx or time would just cost too much. Very nice guy, but when I asked him if call-waiting could be temporarily disabled (for modeming ...) he said that call-waiting was an all or nothing system. They control it at the switch. When I informed him that there was this temporary call-wait turn off feature on other (non-campus) phones (at least in Boston area -- does C&P offer this? To turn off call-wait temporarily in Boston just dial *70 then you get a second dial tone) -- he seemed amazed and said that he did not know of such a feature. I don't love this system -- people calling in often get busy signals because of full trunks here. In fact, I hate it. A normal phone system would be much preferred over this, but this is obviously impossible with the number of people here. Oh yeah ... when I dial 0 + number I get the signal to enter my code. Haven't gone through with it and put my code in though. Can imagine a charge 3x higher than usual if I did. Thanks again, all! Jeff Dubin jdubin@world.std.com jd2859a@american.edu ------------------------------ From: kupiec@hp800.lasalle.edu (Bob Kupiec) Subject: Re: College Phone System AGAIN! Date: 12 Oct 92 22:14:58 GMT Organization: LaSalle University, Philadelphia, PA In , JD2859A@AMERICAN.EDU writes: > Hi all, I'm a student at the American University and have a few q's > about the phone system here. Same situation here at LaSalle University. We have been running on two PBX's (one for campus offices, one for campus dorms) and AT&T ACUS for the dorms for the past few years. We were equipped with free local calls, free 800, Call Waiting, Three-Way Calling and Call Forwarding with all the frills. Now things have changed ... Everything was fine until I returned for the fall semester. They decided to consolidate the two switches into one NCR switch. So far there has been nothing but trouble. 800 access to all 800 numbers are BLOCKED (except for the 445 ACUS prefix) and without an ACUS plan you can't call 800! What about calling card users? The Telecom Operations guy gave me the useless "800 numbers were forwarded to 900 numbers and we don't want to be stuck with the bill" response. Call Waiting sometimes does not work for incoming off-campus calls. There is NO way to block Call Waiting! This give me a fit, because how am I supposed to use the modem?! Also, the Telecom Operations person told me one of the tie lines seems to be messed up because some on-campus calls connect with very faint audio. He also can't seem to find which one it is to disable it either. No Three-Way and no Call-Forwarding enabled. Also, and the previous poster mentioned, there is NO WAY to get a local or LD Operator! NO 9-0 and no 9-00. Only the campus operator. I just hope that 9-911 works in case of an REAL emergency! (How should I test this?) The latest development is the ACUS codes don't even work! For the last few days there has been no way to call home from the campus telephones. I think I should ask for my "phone service" deposit back because I sure don't get any. Bob Kupiec - Amateur Radio: N3MML Internet: kupiec@hp800.lasalle.edu ------------------------------ Subject: Re: College Phone System Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 12:58:45 EDT From: clements@BBN.COM In the discussion of blocking access to time/temperature numbers from a college's PBX, our esteemed Moderator suggests: > [Moderator's Note: Even if those services in DC do not carry premium > charges ala 976, don't they still cost a message 'unit' or some small > amount of money per call? Maybe the administrators there feel even at > that low rate it is a waste of resources. :) PAT] No smiley about it. Let me relate some ancient history. Back in about 1961 I was a wee tad at MIT. Every time the weather was bad a very large fraction of the outside lines were kept busy by people calling the weather number (617-936-1212). And all those calls cost message units. And since most of the trunks were two-way, people got busy signals when calling the MIT switchboard (617-UNIversity-6900). This was long before direct inward dialing. The chief architect of the phone system, the late Carlton E. Tucker, Professor of EE, decided this had to be fixed. He talked with the telco folks and negotiated a price for a permanent trunk from the telco weather recording to MIT. He then whipped up a design that would play that audio onto a block of internal MIT extensions (x5211-521n). Now you could get the weather without tying up outside lines and without running up message units. A side benefit was that you could get the weather without having a "dial-9" class of service on your phone extension. So we at the radio station (then WTBS, now WMBR) saved some message units on our separate outside line, too. All this of course required custom hardware work and some arm-twisting at the state DPU, because the MIT phone system was all owned by Telco and all the services had to be tariffed. But this was no big deal because Prof. Tucker was doing this sort of thing all the time. He held a number of patents on relay and Strowger phone gizmos and the phone company and DPU loved him (at least part of the time). At that time, the MIT PBX was a huge Strowger system with a many-position cord board much like the one PAT describes from his past. I was never formally employed to run the MIT one but I did get on good enough terms with one of the night operators to try out some of the interestingly-labeled jacks once in a while. Bob Clements, K1BC, clements@bbn.com [Moderator's Note: When I was an operator at the University of Chicago from 1958 through about 1962, they had (WEather-4) and (CAThedral 8000) -- the latter for the time of day -- blocked from all extensions. It was a Strowger system also, and there were three groups of cordboards, one group for the main campus (MIDway 0800) with about nine operator positions, one group for the hospitals (MUseum 4-6100) with eight or nine positions and one group for the Computation Center (NORmal 4700) with two or three positions. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 10:14:11 EDT From: Carl Moore (VLD/VMB) Subject: Re: College Phone System Local calls in the DC area, other than the extended-area-local from Va. suburbs to Prince William County, are untimed, although I recall reading that some service plans levy a charge per local call beyond the initail allotment of calls. I do NOT recall 844 and 936 being any different from other local DC-area calls. ------------------------------ From: Bob_Frankston@frankston.com Subject: Re: GTE Addresses On Outgoing Email Date: Mon 12 Oct 1992 09:06 -0400 I also appreciate all (well, most?) submissions and want to encourage them. As an email advocate I feel some obligation to education. The key is that once one starts submitting to telecom, one is no longer a passive reader of a shared bulletin board but rather an individual with an identity. To continue on the analogy with phones, a single TELECOM Digest access at each site is like a single phone at each site. Incoming callers must speak to an receptionist to reach a given person. This might be tolerable for voice but not when one attempts automated access to a Fax machine. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 09:35:03 -0700 From: edg@netcom.com (Ed Greenberg) Subject: Re: GTE Addresses On Outgoing Email Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) This note is to Steven@alchemy.uucp writing about why GTE employees don't need their own accounts. Steven, You DO need an account for yourself. Everyone who posts to the net should have his own account. Two reasons: 1. Accountability. If everyone can log into the same account, and if one person abuses it, all will be under suspicion, and will be tarred with the same brush. Most of us who are security aware would not ever want to be associated with a password that others know. 2. Courtesy and politeness. When a message pops up, I first look at the return address line to see who it's from. When I see that silly reply address, I know nothing more. In a sense, your company is saying, we'll do it our way even though the whole rest of the net does it another way. We don't care. If John Higdon wants to name his machine after a cow, that's his privelege, but if he wants to post messages with non-standard headers, that's not. "MOO!" --John Higdon Ed Greenberg | Home: +1 408 283 0511 | edg@netcom.com 1600 Stokes St. #24 | Work: +1 408 764 5305 | DoD#: 0357 San Jose, CA 95126 | Fax: +1 408 764 5003 | KM6CG (ex WB2GOH) [Moderator's Note: Well you know who else is fond of doing things their own way? The various commercial services which deign to permit their users to read and write to/from Internet. They all must think they are doing *us* the favor by interconnecting ... for the longest time, mcimail.com was incapable of (or unwilling to) handle incoming mail from Internet according to standards. If an envelope had dozens of names (as the one from this Digest does) and they were unable to deliver to one name on the envelope ... well, they would just dump the whole load undelivered. Maybe they changed it now; I've not had any trouble with delivering the Digest there in several weeks. If it is now fixed, I publicly thank them. PAT] ------------------------------ From: stevef@wrq.com (Steve Forrette) Subject: Re: GTE Addresses On Outgoing Email Organization: Walker Richer & Quinn, Inc., Seattle, WA Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 23:13:02 GMT In article JIM.J.MURPHY@gte.sprint.com writes: > Let me explain that Curt and I report to the same building for > work. Curt is a Switching Systems Technician and works on the GTD5 > CO. I am a Facility Maintainer and work outside on deregulated > customer equipment as well as regulated network cable, etc. In this > small town we can work together when the need arises, such as helping > to run some jumpers or testing a cable pair with the CO. I hope that when you call Curt to help run jumpers or do other CO work, that it's for your regulated network cable responsibilities, and not your deregulated customer equipment tasks. This type of situation shows why it is not really possible for a watchful PUC to ensure that the deregulated side of a telco cannot really be operated at "arm's length" such that it has no advantage over competitors. There will always be cases where informal arrangements like this can be used to the advantage of the unregulated side, and the only way to prevent it is to not allow regulated telcos to operate in competitive nonregulated markets. Steve Forrette, stevef@wrq.com, I do not speak for my employer. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 12:40:32 -0400 (EDT) From: Bruce Taylor, IV Subject: Re: Retail Videoconferencing? Laird, Sprint has a network of public and private videoconference rooms. Some are operated by Sprint, others by Sprint customers. Here in Pittsburgh, costs are in the range of $100/half hour, plus communications charges. Try calling the Sprint Meeting Channel reservation center for more information: 800-669-1235. AT&T is affiliated with an entity called the Affinity Group, which operates a number of public video conferencing rooms. Try calling 508-768-7480. Mandatory disclaimer: I'm a customer of both AT&T *and* Sprint, so I guess I'm biased fairly evenly... :-) Bruce Taylor (blt@cmu.edu) (412) 268-6249 New Projects Coordinator, Telecommunications, Carnegie Mellon University ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 14:50 GMT From: Sandy Kyrish <0003209613@mcimail.com> Subject: Re: Retail Videoconferencing Indeed there is a thriving business in public videoconferencing rooms. By far and away the most successful is U.S. Sprint's "The Meeting Channel", with hundreds of rooms across the US and the world. You can rent rooms by the hour at quite reasonable costs. Also, videoconferencing itself is a fairly healthy business, though not of course "blanketing the world" as it was always excessively hyped to do. There are more than 2500 rooms in more than 500 institutions in about 32 countries, and these numbers are about a year old so I'm sure they're conservative. Total revenues for all teleconferencing are about $1 billion per year these days. The industry recently adopted a CCITT standard for coder/decoders and has seen dramatic price reductions in these devices, from $150K to $75K to $30K and now much lower than that. The availability of switched 56 and switched 384 opens up plenty of options too, and declining transmission prices for these offerings helps a lot. Multipoint control units allow true "conference calls" among many sites. Anyone interested in the field should contact the International Teleconferencing Association in Washington DC at 202-833-2549. The main points about videoconferencing, IMHO, are (1) it will never live up to its ridiculous billing and it shouldn't have to; (2) any improvement in digital transmission offerings will benefit videoconferencing; (3) one should NOT strictly limit one's evaluation of videoconferencing to travel reduction. There are many soft dollar benefits that can be directly converted to hard dollar savings (see Meyer and Boone's book "The Information Edge" for a very enlightening look at this subject). Travel reduction is nice and all but it is just like saying you should cost-justify your fax machine only in terms of the postage you don't spend. When videoconferencing is proposed simply as a "travel displacement appliance", it is not only potentially dangerous (what if the project you justified it for goes away), but it is hardly the kind of thing that gets upper management very turned on. As Mary Boone (of above) likes to say, "if you go to a CEO and ask him/her what the biggest challenges facing the company are, he/she is not going to say travel costs." Things like shortening the decision making cycle and bringing a product to market faster are much more beneficial to focus on. All opinions are mine, don't reflect the ITCA or Dean Meyer and Associates, and are welcome to be questioned at: 320-9613@mcimail.com Sandy Kyrish ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Question About ROLM PBX Telephones Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 10:11:00 -0500 From: martin@datacomm.ucc.okstate.edu In article rick@sbcs.sunysb.edu (Rick Spanbauer) writes: > Does anyone know offhand what sort of signalling scheme ROLM uses > between a telephone deskset and their digital pbx? A cursory > inspection of the innards of my telephone reveals an impressive array > of custom transformers, two big LSI chips (one by Exar, one by TI), > and the usual mess of discretes. The Rolm PBX'S are made by Seimens, as far as I know. The signaling format is proprietary and, as you said, totally digital. Digital phones must have an anallog to digital/digital to analog converter set to handle the transition from the analog world of the handset to the digital world which exists in the switch. In addition, low-pass filters are required to remove audio above the 3.1 to 4KHZ used as the top end of the pass-band for voice-quality communications. The Exar chip is probably a phase-locked loop for recovering the data clock. The transformers are for impedance matching and isolation. There is a lot of activity going on in a digital phone. Besides the audio I/O the phone must have the logic to receive and send all necessary display and control signals. This prompts me for a question, also. How electronically similar are the Seimens/Rolm phones to those used on the Ericsson MD110 type switches? Many of the descriptions of the inside and outward appearance of the two brands of phones are strikingly similar. Even some of the glitches such as certain phones loosing track of the digits being dialed if one pushes too many buttons in too short a time sound very similar. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK O.S.U. Computer Center Data Communications Group ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Oct 92 12:49:57 PDT From: lars@CMC.COM (Lars Poulsen) Subject: Re: Question About ROLM PBX Telephones Organization: CMC Network Systems (Rockwell DCD), Santa Barbara, CA, USA In article is written: > Does anyone know offhand what sort of signalling scheme ROLM uses > between a telephone deskset and their digital pbx? A cursory > inspection of the innards of my telephone reveals an impressive array > of custom transformers, two big LSI chips (one by Exar, one by TI), > and the usual mess of discretes. Is the signalling they use > compatible with either ISDN S/T attachment, or perhaps like the > Motorola UDLT format (B+D rather than 2B+D)? The basic signalling > cell seems to be about four microseconds. There are many different models of ROLM systems, and each of them can be coinfigured with different line cards to communicate with different types of desk sets. Without specific model numbers, I doubt that anyone can help you. As you may know, ROLM has been the subjects of takeovers and divestitures. At one time it was swallowed by IBM, and then sold to Siemens. At the present time, I believe it is still owned by Siemens, but does business under the Rolm name again. The system that we use here, is a Siemens series 2000 PBX. Most of our desksets are 2500-clones manufactured by Stromberg for Siemens (the faceplate says Siemens) with message-waiting light. The more featureful desksets are Panasonic KX-T2342 Easa-Phone speakerphones with alpha display. They are definitely not ISDN sets: A standard 2500 set works on the same outlet. I suspect that these are similar to the sets used with the small Panasonic hybrid PBX/KSUs (although they are not compatible with the 308 and its sisters): The first pair is an analog voice circuit, the second pair is a digital data link for the "advanced" features. Lars Poulsen, SMTS Software Engineer Internet E-mail: lars@CMC.COM CMC Network Products / Rockwell Int'l Telephone: +1-805-968-4262 Santa Barbara, CA 93117-3083 TeleFAX: +1-805-968-8256 ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V12 #775 ******************************