Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id BAA03632; Sun, 25 Aug 1996 01:00:00 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 25 Aug 1996 01:00:00 -0400 (EDT) From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Message-Id: <199608250500.BAA03632@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V16 #436 TELECOM Digest Sun, 25 Aug 96 01:00:00 EDT Volume 16 : Issue 436 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson SW Bell Ponders Flat Fee Long Distance (Tad Cook) Some Disappointed With Caller ID (Tad Cook) Can ISP Dial-ins Really Cause Blocking in the CO? (Lars Poulsen) How are Telegrams Sent Today? (Jeremy Buhler) MCI a $500 Million Waste of Talent (mexitech@netcom.com) GTE Says Continuous Internet Connection Desirable (Jack Decker) Nuke Attack? No, Bug in DNS! (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tad Cook Subject: SW Bell Ponders Flat Fee Long Distance Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 17:12:40 PDT Southwestern Bell Eyes Flat-Fee Service By Dwight Silverman, Houston Chronicle Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News Aug. 24--When Southwestern Bell gets into the long-distance business, it might offer an "all-you-can-eat," flat-fee service as an option to its customers. The simple monthly fee for domestic long-distance calling is just one of several pricing packages Bell is considering for the time when it can begin offering long-distance services, a company spokesman said Friday. "Our research shows us that customers would be very receptive to this," said Bob Ferguson, Bell's director of communications. "But this is just one of many items under consideration. We don't know for sure what we'll end up doing." Ferguson said the phone company has been experimenting with different kinds of flat-fee long distance in Houston, the Rio Grande Valley, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Under federal communications regulations, local phone companies cannot offer long distance except within local areas, known as LATAs. Southwestern Bell sells a service in Houston called Local Plus for customers living on the fringes of the 713 area code. For $3 a month, they can place unlimited calls to other 713 numbers that would otherwise be billed by the minute. In Oklahoma and Arkansas, Bell offers a service similar in concept to MCI's Friends and Family. Ferguson said Bell customers can designate about a dozen numbers within a local area that might normally be toll calls and place unlimited calls for $22.50 per month. But the most popular flat-fee service is in the Rio Grande Valley. The local area there runs almost the entire length of the Valley, and for $25 a month Bell customers can call anywhere in the region. Both state and federal regulators are in the process of examining Bell's request to offer domestic long-distance service to all its customers -- and even Bell isn't sure of just how the regulation may be handled. The federal Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 grants local phone companies the ability to compete in the long-distance market for the first time since the breakup of AT&T in 1984. "There are 700-plus pages of rules, and we're still deep into analyzing them," Ferguson said. He would not say how much Southwestern Bell would charge per-month if it decides to offer flat-fee long-distance services. Both Southwestern Bell and Pacific Telesis -- the California phone company with which Southwestern Bell is merging -- have contracted to resell long-distance services from Sprint. Under federal law, phone companies can't sell long-distance services for less than it costs them. But Ferguson said Bell could still offer long distance routed through its own facilities and not use Sprint's lines. Jerry Cooperman, a vice president and research director for the Gartner Group, which studies high-tech industries, said phone companies have been looking for a way to get out of the long-distance price wars. "They don't want to do that anymore, but even more price pressure is going to come at them through the local phone carriers," Cooperman said. Southwestern Bell, which analysts consider to the most financially healthy local phone company, "has the strength to drive this kind of pricing in their territory," he said. Cooperman said other phone companies also have experimented with flat-fee long-distance services, including AT&T, which just launched a flat-fee trial in a region of New England. ------------------------------ From: Tad Cook Subject: Some Disappointed With Caller ID Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 17:18:30 PDT Caller Identification Not the Panacea Customers Thought it Would Be By Matt Cory, Grand Forks Herald, N.D. Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News Aug. 25--Buyer beware. Caller identification systems, or Caller IDs, have been one of the hottest products on the telecommunications market the past few years. But they are not the cure-all many think they are. Many people have become dissatisfied with the systems because they do not trace every call to individual user's systems. It has some definite advantages; "it does do what it says it will do -- to a point," said Bruce Nyhlen, who has owned a Caller ID for three months. Caller IDs can be plugged into a phone or wall jack. Sizes and features vary, but most feature services to track incoming callers and their telephone numbers. Some also will show the time and date of the call, as well as how many calls have been received. Caller ID systems can range in price from $25 to more than $100. Phones that come with Caller ID installed can cost up to $200. But the problem lies when the calls are long distance. Cost for the sevice is about $6 a month from local long-distance companies. Prices vary on what features the user chooses. Nyhlen said that many of his incoming calls that are long distance are not showing up on his system. With relatives scattered across the country, he has to answer, he said. What he's found, more often than not, is a telemarketer. "It is to the point now, we have to check it because of family members and we automatically assume it is a telemarketer," he said. "What I'm suspecting is that the telemarketing industry has found a way to get around it, so the signal will come out as out of area." But when Caller IDs first became available from U$S West last September, only local calls could be identified. That is still the dilemma, a US West official said. "It's really a technology situation," US West spokeswoman Vivian Dockter said. " The first phase of Caller IDs was the local systems putting it in and only local calls will pop up. The second phase is when the long-distance companies are putting in Caller IDs and not all of them have done that. Dockter said it depends on the company the long-distance caller is using. If they offer the Caller ID services, even the numbers of those who don't order the service in the area should appear on your ID system. But if the company does't offer the services, or the person or business takes steps to block its number from you, it will not show up on your system, she said. Dockter also said cellular phones almost always will show up as out of area on a system, simply because the software isn't there yet for those numbers to be included. Telemarketers are facing the same issue as other individuals and business across the country, Dockter said. They simply may not have the local long-distance service that offers Caller ID. Or the system they have bought may not be able to trace long-distance calls, even if the caller has Caller ID. With the many phone lines in the country to go through, some with Caller ID, some without, technology can't keep track of all the telemarketing firms. Bashing telemarketers ProMark One Marketing Services Inc. opened its doors in Grand Forks in August 1994. In that time, the telemarketing firm has grown to be one of the city's largest employers. ProMark also has offices in Phoenix and Tempe, Ariz, as well as Minot and Mandan, N.D. ProMark is one of the sixth-largest telemarketing companies in the nation, Grand Forks assistant center manager Bruce Senti said. He said there simply isn't the technology available nationwide to track all telemarketing companies. "It is a technology issue; it is simply not possible," Senti said. Senti said the Grand Forks offices does not call residents in the Grand Forks area, but calls 43 other states. With so many calls originating at the one office traveling though fiber-optic trunk lines and other switches, there isn't the technology to keep track of all the calls, he said. Senti said there was no movement in the industry to skirt the Caller ID system. He said it will even benefit telemarketing. "People like to bash telemarketers," he said. "But we have been successful, and it is not driven on sales. It is quality driven. We have measured standards for everything we use. When we call, for whoever we are representing, we must identify ourselves on the phone and identify the individual we represent. The (bad) reputation was earned by the telemarketers that are the small and unprofessional and the scam artists." Senti said that when technology becomes available, people will be better able to know who is calling them. And if they are the victim of scam artists, the number will available to authorities. Despite some of the complaints about the long-distance calls, Dockter said overall response to Caller IDs has been positive. "The sales have been way above our expectations. Customers are enjoying it a lot," she said. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 15:27:53 -0700 From: lars@anchor.RNS.COM (Lars Poulsen) Subject: Can ISP Dial-ins Really Cause Blocking in the CO? Both in TELECOM Digest and on the COM-PRIV mailing list, the issue has been raised about telephone companies complaining to the regulatory authority that home access to the Internet through modem dial-in to a local ISP places an undue burden on the local exchange facilities, and the telco wants a regulatory change to put an end to this "misuse" which is caused by the availability of flat rate local calling. As a suggested remedy, at least in the US, the telco wants ISPs to be subject to the same two cent per minute access charges as the long- distance telephone carriers. Many outside of the telco management are sceptical of these claims of blocking, and observe that this request for tariff relief (which ISPs claim will drive them out of business) comes just as the telcos themselves are getting ready to roll out internet access services. The following quote from a knowledgeable journalist is illustrative: The [telcos] aren't provisioning their switches in suburban areas to provide access rates at anything near the blocking rates. In the city areas I am told that the modern switches are usually provisioned to something near the 70-75% blocking rate limit, while in suburban areas it is down around the 30%. So, suburban calls are more likely to come up against the busy barrier - however, no one I know has ever seen this happen at times when people are surfing the Internet - which, is 9 to 11 at night. The problem is that the carrier is claiming that the Internet users are pushing the 'technical limits' of their exchange, and leaving everyone with the suggestion that it would be a very expensive thing to fix. In fact, we see no limit, and it is a financial decision rather than a technical one. The carrier argument is cogently expressed by Bell Atlantic: Bell Atlantic did a study of the impact of the Internet explosion during February and March, 1996. We submitted the study to the Federal Communications Commission. ... We have posted both the article and the original study on the Bell Atlantic Internet site (http://ba.com/ea/fcc). The study shows that there are in fact some exchanges where Internet access traffic has exceeded the traditional busy hour, creating a new busy hour during the evening hours, around 9 PM. In particular, this seems to happen where a suburban area with no concentration of business subscribers acquires an ISP. Such a bedroom community may for years have been served by a Remote Switching Unit (RSU) using a minimum amount of connection paths within the RSU and an even smaller amount of trunkage to connect the RSU to the main switch, located in another community. The typical subscriber line in this area may have had 20 minutes of local calls per day and 10 minutes of calls outside of the RSU. As the ISP moves in, some percentage of the residences now have 120 minutes of internet access per day (i.e. five to six times to previous traffic), and if the ISP is on the main switch, this new traffic requires interoffice trunkage (so that the need for interoffice trunkage for these subscribers is 12-15 times the previous traffic). If the ISP is located on the same RSU, they take up a number of line groups which will be fully loaded during the busy hour. According to the Bell Atlantic report, each line group module can accept 512 station ports, but provides only 64 channels into the switching fabric. Thus, it is much more expensive to equip the RSU to accommodate the ISP lines. After pondering these facts for a while, I realize that this doesn't have to be a problem. If the telco spreads the ISP lines evenly across the switch (putting no more than 16 on any one 512-port module) the switch as described can easily take the load. Friends, if we are to survive this assault, we need to educate the commissioners, so that they will be able to understand that the "dangerous overload caused by ISP traffic" is just another manifestation of a total failure of the telcos to understand the nature of Internet access, leading to a failure to construct a working network out of the perfectly good building blocks that they have on hand. In the long run, I think we are nearing the end of flat-rate local calls for residential subscribers. Back in February, I wrote an article about the issues, it is still available on: http://www.silcom.com/~lars/editorial/telecom.html ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 11:48:45 GMT From: Jeremy Buhler Subject: How Are Telegrams Sent Today? This morning, I sent a Western Union telegram to my grandparents, who are on vacation for their 50th anniversary. Never having sent a telegram before, I was astounded how much it cost -- nearly $40 for only 20 words, plus the cost of tracking and receipt confirmation! This experience has left me with a couple of questions: 1. Has the cost of a WU telegram (in real dollars) always been this high? If not, when did the cost attain the present level? 2. How are telegrams transmitted today? Western Union's Commercial Services web site (http://www.wucs.com/) gave me the impression that the company now uses the telcos for data transport and adds value through data-processing and assured rapid-delivery services. 3. I found various materials in the Telecom Archives describing WU's history through the early 60's. What's happened to the company since then? Jeremy [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What has happened to the company since then is that they have gone through bankruptcy; they have gone through being picked apart by numerous other firms which took the most profitable parts of the company away; and they have been assaulted by a lot of new technology they have been unable to keep up with. That, in a nutshell is what happened to Western Union. In the 1960's the cost of a telegram of perhaps a dozen words or so was about two dollars, *and that included delivery of a printed copy to you by a messenger.* You were free to give the messenger a small additional tip if you wanted to do do, and most people did. When WUTCO operated their public offices -- where you could walk in off the street to send a telegram or wait for one to arrive in your name -- the same dozen or so words was about a dollar provided they did not have to deliver it (you were there waiting for it or you went to their office in response to their phone call that a telegram was waiting.) Telegrams sent 'collect' instead of paid had a surcharge just like phone calls, or if you used your Western Union credit card to pay for messages you called in on the phone there was a surcharge. There was no surcharge for billing a telegram to your phone bill and there was no surcharge if you were at a pay phone and dropped coins in the box when they asked you to pay for it. They were happy to read the telegram to you over the phone and send you a copy in the mail for the same rate as if you called for it in person at their office. (Remember, in those days the US Mail was delivered in many places *twice per day* and typically a letter sent several hundred miles got delivered the next day, so it was not like getting a telegram mailed to you would take a week or so as the regular mail does now.) The local agent would drop a copy in the mail on your request and you would receive it from your postman usually the next morning anyway. There were certain types of telegrams which were considered non-deliverable by telephone and these included messages stating that someone had died, or that some tragedy of a personal nature had occurred of direct relevance to the recipient. During the Second World War and the Korean 'police action' for instance, messages pertaining to the deaths of military personnel were required to be delivered by messenger in writing. Larger customers of WUTCO were given charge accounts (as opposed to the little card anyone could carry around which was the same as a phone company calling card, but for telegram purposes) and they usually had 'commercial rates' which were better than those given the general public. Anyone could have (but usually only the larger commercial accounts had) a 'cable address'. A 'cable address' was what would these days be referred to on your computer network as an 'alias' for delivery purposes. Instead of the sender needing to know your complete name and address for the purposes of delivery, all he needed to know was your 'cable address'. For example, the cable address 'Housereps' was for the House of Representatives. Here in Chicago I recall that 'Symphony' was tbe cable address for the Orchestral Association, the management side of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Cable addresses were almost invariably cutesey little words and short phrases. A couple others I remember seeing a lot were 'Largest Store' for Sears, Roebuck and 'Beacon Hill' but I do not remember who that was. Certain cable addresses were automatic reverse charge addresses, much like 800 phone service where the recipient always agreed to accept collect telegrams. If you went to their office or called on the phone and said you wanted to send a message to a cable address, the clerk would just refer to a flip-chart and see what that 'aliased out' to be. Larger customers quite often had a teletype machine on their premises which was used to send/receive messages through the local Western Union office eliminating the need for a messenger, but these were customers getting fifty or sixty or even a hundred telegrams daily and quite often sending that many out as well or perhaps they had a 'telex machine' hooked directly into the network bypassing the local telegraph office completely. I do not know what a dozen words for two dollars including delivery in 1960's money would be in 1996 money. And a rate that high was only for casual users; anyone who was a regular user of WUTCO had lower rates, I am sure. At the time WUTCO clock service was dropped in the middle 1960's they charged sometime like a dollar per month per clock for the hourly pulse. Have some fun! Call and tell them now you want to send a message to a 'cable address' ... probably most of them never heard of such a thing. A lot of them probably do not know telegrapms printed on little yellow sheets of paper could be sent 'restricted delivery to addressee only' (basically like a person-to-person phone call, if anyone still makes calls that way) and in that event, the messenger would not just leave it with whoever answered the door at your house. He would insist on seeing the specified person and putting the telegram in his hands only. PAT] ------------------------------ From: mexitech@netcom.com (Patrick) Subject: MCI a $500 Million Waste of Talent Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 14:57:50 GMT I did some on line checking the other day for all the carriers web pages and after viewing sprint, At&T and others, I tried MCI, unbievably fast in both shell and netcruiser. I was impressed! I go to the search engine, find what I am looking for, backtrack to business and fill out the form, requesting quotation, in the memo or notes field I amplify my request, we have a 1500 mile T-1, proprietary switch, teleport acccess in L.A, and another San Diego, I want to buy some bandwith! What do I get instead, after filling out the form in good faith, I get what I percieve as harrassing calls from their residential group in Atlanta "referring to my internet form". I explain very nicely that I am in business, want bandwith and he keeps going back to residential, after four times explaining, and five times hearing his obviously canned sales pitch, I tell him, "Look, I am in the business, I have been for nearly 20 years as an telecom analyst, If you can't understand what I want to buy, I will have to teach you". Now send me a check for as many hours as your feeble mind can take at one time at $65 dollars an hour, in addition, cancel all of my MCI lines and connect me to AT&T. Is anyone else experiencing this flagrant slamming tactic? They just buiilt a $500 million dollar link with Avantel in Mexico, another 1.5 billion dollars to go, a new switching center fully staffed in Mexico and they abuse the stockholders money with this kind of idiocy. Ma Bell, I am sorry, please come home, Patrick needs you! Patrick mexitech@netcom.com ------------------------------ From: jack@novagate.com (Jack Decker) Subject: GTE Says Continuous Internet Connection Desirable Date: Sat, 24 Aug 1996 05:14:35 GMT Organization: GTE Intelligent Network Services, GTE INS I was looking for soimething else on GTE's Web site, and came across the press release at this URL: http://www.gte.com/Glance/News/Releases/Corp/1996/Aug/19960814.html This page is a standard press release about an Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) trial in Texas. However, two paragraphs of this release immediately jumped out at me. The first states: "ADSL service works by connecting a pair of modems to each end of a telephone line, with one modem being located in the telephone company's central office and the other at the home or office of the user. ADSL also maximizes the use of existing technology because it operates over twisted-pair copper telephone lines, streamlining installation and controlling expenses." Note, please, that in this scenario, you do not connect to a C.O. telephone switch and get dial tone. You have an ADSL modem on one end of the line, and GTE puts their ADSL modem on the other end. Of course, one fully expects (given the requirements of the Telecommunications Act) that other Internet Service Providers will also be able to lease "twisted-pair copper telephone lines" from the phone company, to run between between their Points-of-Presence and customer locations, and put their own ADSL (or other) modems at each end. In any case, with this setup Internet users cannot possibly cause any "congestion" of the local telephone switching equipment because they're bypassing it completely! And the second paragraph is even better: "DSL services are also significant in that they provide continuous Internet access rather than traditional dial-up modem connections. This enables many new types of services that benefit from the 'always connected' nature of these DSL offerings. These applications (e.g. multicasting) historically could only be offered in the Local Area Network (LAN) environments of corporate networks, but can now be extended to residences and remote offices." So, in this press release, we have GTE on record as saying that a continuous connection to the Internet is a desirable thing - not that we needed GTE to tell us this, but it's refreshing to hear a phone company admit that a 24 hour per day connection is desirable, rather than blaming Internet users who spend time online as the reason that the phone system is "going to Hell in a handbasket" (as some of the "Baby Bells" are apparently trying to do)! Jack ------------------------------ Subject: Nuke Attack? No, Bug in DNS! Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 13:03:57 PDT From: rishab@dxm.org (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) Reply-To: rishab@dxm.org Was I the only one nuked by the DNS/BIND crash yesterday? As not everyone here reads c.p.tcp-ip.d I've attached Karl Denninger's analysis. For those who were luckily immune, my ISP (best.com) like many others, had it's DNS crash for _local_ domain names (belonging to the ISP and customers like me) through most of yesterday. No, not a virus, but bad DNS records "floating around" as Karl puts it, that happened to expose a bug in the latest version of BIND. So much for immunity to nuclear war! Rishab From: karl@MCS.COM (Karl Denninger) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains Subject: SERIOUS PROBLEM WITH DNS SERVERS AND BAD RECORDS - Rev 4.9.4 Date: 23 Aug 1996 10:10:39 -0500 Organization: MCSNet Ops, Chicago, IL > CAUTION! > There are a series of bad nameserver records floating around on the net > which are blowing up BIND versions 4.9.4 (REL and T5B) and possibly other > releases as well. > This has been VERIFIED to be impacting multiple ISPs and their DNS servers. > We are shutting off updates from ANY DNS server which presents bogus data, > which stops it from killing our code, but is of no help to the large number > of domains which are presumably rendered unreachable. > At present, this list is: > bogusns 204.94.129.65 158.43.192.7 > ; > bogusns 199.3.12.2 38.241.98.5 199.71.224.105 206.215.3.10 > bogusns 134.75.30.253 198.41.0.4 128.63.2.53 198.41.0.4 > bogusns 206.66.184.11 206.66.104.37 > ; > bogusns 163.173.128.6 163.173.128.254 200.6.39.1 192.33.4.12 128.174.36.254 > bogusns 129.79.1.9 128.174.5.58 > All of these have presented at least one malformed record to us in the > last two hours! > Folks, if you run one of these servers, start tracking down the problem on > your end. If this is bad cached data, THOSE AFFECTED MUST FLUSH IT > AS SOON AS POSSIBLE TO TRY TO PREVENT PROPAGATION. > This problem started as an isolated set of incidents yesterday, and is now > spreading like wildfire. > The actual bad data appears to be a domain name being returned in an > authority record which is of the form "domain.comcom". We have not > yet caught a bad returned record in a debug file; that is being attempted > now. > When this goes through "dn_expand" in the BIND code, it causes memory > arena corruption and subsequent failure to resolve VALID zones which you > are authoritative for. First signs are reports of "corrupted authority data" > if you are using "dig" to check zones which you hold authority records for. > We are working on a way to "harden" the code against this kind of junk data, > but until we can get one deployed our defense is to shut down communication > from those who are presenting us the garbage. > PLEASE CHECK YOUR NAMESERVERS OUT AND TAKE NECESSARY STEPS YOURSELF! This > is a serious problem which has the possibility of melting significant parts > of the Internet infrastructure. > Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - The Finest Internet Connectivity > http://www.mcs.net/~karl | T1 from $600 monthly; speeds to DS-3 available > | 23 Chicagoland Prefixes, 13 ISDN, much more > Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| Email to "info@mcs.net" WWW: http://www.mcs.net/ > Fax: [+1 312 248-9865] | Home of Chicago's only FULL Clarinet feed! ------------------------------ 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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A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V16 #436 ******************************