TELECOM Digest Sat, 21 Jan 95 07:27:00 CST Volume 15 : Issue 54 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Pending ATT Videoconferencing Patent With C++ Source Code (Greg Aharonian) Programmable Touch-Tone Interpreter Needed (Paul Robinson) Re: CallerID and ANI (Scott Falke) Re: Cellular Fraud: How Much of it is Real Money? (Michael D. Sullivan) Re: Attention: 800 Number Subscribers (News Alert) (Bob Goudreau) Re: Looking For TDM Box (Paul A. Lee) 800-MY-ANI-IS and Car Phone Redialers (Tom Ward) Cellular Exchanges Wanted (Tom Ward) Re: Can Caller ID Information Be Faked? (Chris Telesca) Re: Where to Get Text of the ECPA? (Wilson Mohr) Where: T1 Information/FAQ? (bruce268@delphi.com) Re: ISDN in Florida (bh0386@aol.com) Telephony Card/Software Needed (Paul Garfield) 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. 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: srctran@world.std.com (Gregory Aharonian) Subject: Pending ATT Videoconferencing Patent With C++ Source Code Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Fri, 20 Jan 1995 18:40:11 GMT 19941019 ATT Videoconferencing patent with C++ source code ATT has a patent pending at the US Patent and Trademark Office dealing with multimedia conferencing. While not overly notable for novel ideas, it does list 12,000 lines of C++ source code, if you are interested in learning more about how ATT does software. The patent is titled "Multimedia Communications Network" and filed April 1993. The abstract starts: "A circuit configuration in a multimedia network simulates an actual meeting room where the conferences between two or more people may be held." To order a copy of the patent application, contact your local supplier of patent hardcopy and ask for PCT application WO 94/24807 filed on April 15,1994. Of interest to telecommunications investors is which countries ATT designated that it might be filing national applications (PCT applications only protect your filing date and is not a standalone patent application). ATT lists most but not all of the European/EPO countries (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Sweden), Japan, Canada, Australia, Brazil, China, Korea and New Zealand. I guess that is where all of the telecom money is at. Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service (for subscription info, send 'help' to patents@world.std.com ) (for prior art search services info, send 'prior' to patents@world.std.com ) (for WWW patent searching, try http://sunsite.unc.edu/patents/intropat.html ) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Jan 1995 14:17:14 EST From: Paul Robinson Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA Subject: Programmable Touch-Tone Interpreter Needed Jeffrey A. Porten , writes: > a client.. wants to provide her incoming callers with a automated > system that will allow them to schedule time with her by using a > touch-tone phone Sounds like what she wants is an automated scheduling system. > I just attended the Consumer Electronics Show, and was very > disappointed with the selection there; most vendors basically said, > "can't be done" or "I'll do it if you order 10,000 units." Eh? I wonder if he has a license to spread cow manure, because he's doing a pretty good job. The gonoph should have his license lifted. > Anyone with suggestions on how to do this? Proposals from vendors > also cheerfully accepted. I can supply a product to do this, including the computer to run it on, for about $500. If the customer has an extra 286 they're not using, then the price would be less. This isn't rocket science, it's mainly getting the parts and putting together the stuff to do what is desired. You can give me a call at 1-800-TDARCOS if you're interested. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Jan 95 21:45:17 -0800 From: scott@csustan.csustan.edu (Scott Falke) Subject: Re: CallerID and ANI Organization: CSU Stanislaus In article barrus@merl.com writes: > My wife sometimes returns calls to mental health patients when they > phone an emergency number. When CallerID was started in our area, we > called and specifically asked to have line blocking put on our line > (we have to press something like *67 to turn on CallerID on outgoing > Two evenings ago, I called PC Connection from our phone and casually > asked if our number had come through when the customer assistant > answered our phone. He then proceeded to recite our phone number to > me. I did not (and never have) dialed the code to turn on CallerID. At least PCConnx honestly advertises this feature. They *will* disable the link to your account at your request. Other 800 sleazeball outfits take the oppposite appraoch and *lie* about it, even when directly questioned. I was charged 6-bucks+ using a flip-phone in rural Idaho once. Knowing ANI was linked to US-Whores roamer custserv 800 number, I *still* called 'em up and suggested a new name that more accurately described their true corporate motives; i.e.; the rep heard the term "Total Bastard Cellular" from my lips in a most close-up and personal manner. scott@csustan.csustan.edu ------------------------------ From: mds@access.digex.net (Michael D. Sullivan) Subject: Re: Cellular Fraud: How Much of it is Real Money? Date: 21 Jan 1995 01:10:07 -0500 Organization: Wilkinson, Barker, Knauer & Quinn (Washington, DC, USA) Paul Robinson writes: > I'm going to raise an issue here because I think it relates to the > issue of why nothing beyond lip service seems to be done by carriers > about cellular fraud. > Let me explain that I'm not condoning the idea of cellular fraud, what > I want to do is discover exactly where the numbers for the amount is > coming from and what relationship to reality those numbers represent. > I remember reading some seven years ago an article which someone had > gotten permission to reprint out of a magazine that stated that > because the ESN and MIN pairs are sent in clear the possibility for > fraud was virtually unlimited. > I got thinking about the issue and wondered: of the industry claimed > more than $1 million a day in fraud that occurs, how much of this is > real money, how much is it lost profits, and how much is sheer > imagination? When a phone is cloned, it is typically used not by Joe Devious to call his office, family, and friends, or to call other mobiles. It is typically used for a day or two by a criminal enterprise to sell long-distance calls, and particularly international calls. The phone gets used for a few days or even hours to sell immigrants the ability to call home in India, Taiwan, Somalia, etc. for say $10 for 10-15 minutes. The airtime costs involved are minimal compared with the long-distance charges. The call-shop operator pockets the cash, then either trashes the phone or re-clones it to a different number. The cellular system incurs actual cash losses equal to the long-distance charges; this may be picked up by the home system, if the cloned number is from a roamer. Whether the serving system or the home system pays, the cellular industry loses big-time cash. Even if a cloned phone is used for local landline calls, there are big losses. If the cloned number is a roamer, the home system picks up losses for the airtime and local connection charge. Many cellular systems charge both per-minute rates for airtime and a local landline charge of 10 cents or so to cover landline interconnection. Whether there's a markup in these or not, the home system that has to pay is socked big-time. Plus there is the cost of doing the roamer verification and record transfer. Roamer verification database administration is expensive; that's why there is typically a premium price paid to roam. These are actual cash losses. The only time there are not actual cash losses is when the cloned phone is used to call only mobile numbers in the same area and neither the cloned number nor the called number is a roamer. It's pretty unlikely that this is a significant proportion of cellular fraud. If a local phone is cloned and only local calls are made, the cellular operator is out of pocket for local interconnection costs and operational overhead costs. If one assumes, as some have asserted, that cellular companies have a 40% profit ratio, then their out-of-pocket costs are 60% of the charges. Think of it this way: If someone broke into your home or tapped into your phone line and made $2000 of calls, your loss would be $2000. If the phone company decided to eat that cost, its loss would be $2000. If the long-distance company decided to eat that cost, its loss would be $2000. Stealing $2000 in phone calls results in $2000 in losses. The same facilities are used to make fraudulent calls as would be used for legitimate calls. The costs are the same, the profits are the same; if the bill isn't paid, those costs are lost and so are the profits. It's not quite the same as software copying, where there are no direct costs to the software company if a kid copies his dad's Autocad. Michael D. Sullivan | INTERNET E-MAIL TO: mds@access.digex.net Bethesda, Md., USA | also avogadro@well.com, 74160.1134@compuserve.com ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Jan 1995 14:30:13 -0500 From: goudreau@dg-rtp.dg.com (Bob Goudreau) Subject: Re: Attention: 800 Number Subscribers (News Alert) producer@pipeline.com (Judith Oppenheimer) writes: > Remember, too, that international freephone numbers will *co-exist* > with domestic toll-free numbers in the U.S.. > So there will be 1 800 FLOWERS, and 011 800 FLOWERS, both of which can > be called and advertised within the United States, but which may reach > competing companies! This seems to imply that the +800 country code will contain numbers with only seven digits, yielding a total of no more than ten million international free-phone numbers for the entire world! Given that the North American Numbering Plan alone is already close to running out of seven-digit intra-NANP free-phone numbers, isn't this +800-XXX-XXXX arrangement a bit short-sighted? > If the U.S. position, and U.S. Users Group Position, of grandfathering > existing U.S. 800 numbers is not aggressively supported by U.S. 800 > subscribers, these companies will find they have a 50-50 chance of > winning -- or losing -- their branded number to a lottery, and > competition for the same customers and marketshare in the U.S., and > abroad. Many countries besides the US have intra-national free-phone services. Some even use the same 800 area code! I believe that Ireland, for example, even uses 1-800 as the full prefix, just like the NANP (although I understand that the number that follows is only six, not seven, digits). So why should owners of US 800 numbers (or even NANP 800 numbers -- don't forget Canada and the islands!) be singled out for the privilege of "grandfathering" their existing numbers into the worldwide +800 number space? That doesn't sound very fair to the rest of the world. I think that better schemes are available that could address both these issues (number scarcity and number collision). One simple idea would be to use the format +800--. For example, the US number 1-800-FLOWERS would also be available internationally (assuming the company was willing to pay for incoming international calls) as +800-1-FLOWERS, and a hypothetical Irish number 1-800-FLOWER could be dialed internationally as +800-353-FLOWER. Since each country code would have its own domain within the overall +800 number space, no collisions would be possible. Of course, even this simple scheme could still run into the number scarcity problem, since it presumes only a single free-phone area code for each country (a presumption that will soon break in the NANP, as the 800 NPA fills up and additional free-phone NPAs are allocated). So perhaps the only fool-proof plan is to just use +800- as a prefix to the entire national toll free number, area code and all. Under this method, the US and Irish examples above would become +800 1 800 FLOWERS and +800 353 800 FLOWER, respectively. There are disadvantages with this idea too, of course. One is that all national free-phone numbers that can be mapped transparently into the +800 space must be no longer than - 3 digits, where is the ITU limit on the number of digits that can follow the "+" sign. Fortunately, itself will soon change (or has just recently changed) from 12 to 15 anyway, so this might not be a problem. But the sheer length of the resulting +800 numbers would be unattractive. Bob Goudreau Data General Corporation goudreau@dg-rtp.dg.com 62 Alexander Drive +1 919 248 6231 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 02:28:13 -0500 Subject: Re: Looking for TDM Box From: Paul A. Lee Organization: Woolworth Corporation In {TELECOM Digest), Volume 14 Issue 33, Andrew P. Dinsdale wrote (in part): > We are looking for a Time Division Multiplexing Box to split a 56k > digital line into one voice channel, one data channel and handle more > than one point-to-point digital circuit with one voice and one data > channel. MICOM in Simi Valley, CA, is somewhat of a specialist in such devices. Call them at 800-642-6687 or 805 583-8600. Paul A. Lee Voice 414 357-1409 Telecommunications Analyst FAX 414 357-1450 Woolworth Corporation CompuServe 70353,566 INTERNET <=PREFERRED ADDRESS* ------------------------------ From: gaypanda@pinn.net (Tom Ward) Subject: 800-MY-ANI-IS and Car Phone Redialers Date: 20 Jan 1995 04:57:10 GMT Organization: Pinnacle Online - Internet access for Hampton Roads, Virginia I recently called 800-MY-ANI-IS from my Contel Cellular telephone. Instead of reading back my cellular number of 804/635-XXXX the number was translated as 804/623-9110. When I tried calling this number directly, it said that the number was being checked for trouble. My question is: Do cellular switches use landline telephone lines with DIDs of their own to put calls through? Tom Ward, President & CEO AirPage Communications of Va email: gaypanda@pinn.net pager: 804/326-PAGE [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Something like this is common. I do know that cellular phones here in the Chicago area return very odd numbers when tested against Caller-ID and ANI. Often as not, Caller-ID boxes show the cellular phone as 'out of area', but at least in the case of my cellular phone, the ANI given was cross-referenced to a 'subscriber' given as 'IBT Company', at an address which turned out to be a central office in one of the western suburbs -- with a 312 area code yet, even though the suburbs are 708. When I tried to dial that number, it was intercepted saying the number was not in service for incoming calls. PAT] ------------------------------ From: gaypanda@pinn.net (Tom Ward) Subject: Cellular Exchanges Wanted Date: 21 Jan 1995 05:05:41 GMT Organization: Pinnacle Online - Internet access for Hampton Roads, Virginia I am working on a project to develope a shareware database of NPA/NXX data. Included in this database will be NPA/NXX location data, state, type of number (land line, pager, cellular, pcs, etc.), and responsible carrier. Each exchange is broken down into "billable" sections: for example, some paging companies by blocks of numbers from an exchange but not the entire exchange. úÿ If anyone has any information on pager and/or cellular NPA/NXX-XXXX data, please email me with the information. If you do not with to give me your cellular or pager number, I completely understand. (I wouldn't either.) Just email me with the area code, exchange and first digit of the four remaining numbers along with the city, state and carrier. Thank you all for your assistance. NOTE: All those who perticipate in "donating" information shall have their names and email addresses listed in the "Special Thanks" documentation of the program. Tom Ward, President & CEO AirPage Communications of Va email: gaypanda@pinn.net pager: 804/326-PAGE ------------------------------ From: sascjt@unx.sas.com (Chris Telesca) Subject: Re: Can Caller ID Information Be Faked? Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 10:09:45 GMT Organization: SAS Institute Inc. In article , sascjt@unx.sas.com (Chris Telesca) writes: > I recently got Caller-ID and *69 Call Return service beause a friend > and I have been getting prank and other strange phone calls over the > last few months. Generally it works great, but several times I've > seen a few numbers displayed numerous times and used *69 to call the > number back, only to find that the people I've called back say they > never called me at all (sometimes these are elderly people, BTW). > So I was wondering if it possible to somehow fool Caller ID/Call Return > features into displaying and/or calling back the wrong/incorrect number? > Any ideas, thoughts, experiences? Thanks to the Editor and others who have responded so far. While I have both Caller-ID and *69 phone features, my friend (who lives elsewhere) only has *69. She can only trace back the last number that called her. I get a number of ANONYMOUS CALLER calls on my Caller-ID box. If I'm not home when these calls come in, or I've turned the ringer off at night and miss a number of calls, then I can't use *69 to trace these calls. I also can't check to see if the info on the screen changes. A number of these ANNONYMOUS calls are coming from pay phones where someone can press *67 and block their phone number. *69 will not call back these numbers, according to my experience and according to Southern Bell. Raleigh is also ringed by many small towns and several different phone companies: GTE, Centel, Contel, Carolina Telephone/Sprint, etc. Calls made from some of these companies show up as OUT OF AREA calls. Some show the phone number, but will not let you use *69 to redial, so I presume that some of my ANONYMOUS calls that I can't use *69 to call back might be from these phones as well as from some local pay phones. I've back-tracked many of the calls using a 1-900 number and/or various Cross Reference phone directories (at local libraries). 99% of the calls I can trace are coming from individual homes as opposed to apartment complexes, so I don't know how someone could tap or splice into someone else's line in the open out on the street. Thanks for the info so far. Chris Telesca Associate Photographer (919)677-8001 x7489 SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Dr. / Cary, NC 27513 / sascjt@unx.sas.com ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 12:58:19 GMT From: Wilson Mohr Subject: Re: Where to Get Text of the ECPA? PAT (telecom@eecs.nwu.edu) wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Now that you mention it, I have a full > copy here sent recently to me by someone, and I think I will send it > out as a special mailing in the next day or three. It is quite huge, > so I may have to just put it in the archives for reference. PAT] Yes, it is rather intimidating. It was 42 pages when I formatted it out to the printer. I do not have to worry about being able to get to sleep for awhile. One, maybe three pages and I'm out like a light! Many thanks to all for their replies. Wilson Mohr mohr@cig.mot.com Strategic Quality - Motorola Cellular Infrastructure Group [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It is installed in the TELECOM Archives. Anyone who wants a full copy of the text can pull it from there. PAT] ------------------------------ From: BRUCE268@news-feed.delphi.com (BRUCE268@DELPHI.COM) Subject: Where: T1 Information/FAQ? Date: 21 Jan 1995 03:07:25 -0500 Organization: Delphi Internet Services Corporation Would some one please pass on any sites/addresses where information or FAQs on T1 service might be found. Looking for general technical overview of the service. Thanks in advance. Bruce ------------------------------ From: bh0386@aol.com (BH0386) Subject: Re: ISDN in Florida Date: 21 Jan 1995 06:05:13 -0500 Organization: America Online, Inc. (1-800-827-6364) Southern Bell has ISDN in Florida. You can call 1-800-858-9413 (BellSouth Data Customer Support Center) and they can determine avaliability in your area and give you the price for both residential and business service. ------------------------------ From: garfield@vanilla.cs.umn.edu (Paul Garfield) Subject: Telephony Card/Software Needed Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 07:10:06 GMT I've seen a couple similar questions posted but haven't seen an answer. Please post the answer. I'm looking for cards for IBM PCs that can handle phone calls. I need to be able to program how the call is handled (when and what to play and record, what to do with touch tone presses, etc). All I've seen is things for one line. I want to start with about four lines but have the ability to upgrade to perhaps 24, so I need multiple (four or eight) lines per card. What are good vendors for this and where can I go for information? Thanks. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V15 #54 *****************************