Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id SAA21980; Tue, 27 Jan 1998 18:09:26 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 18:09:26 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199801272309.SAA21980@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V18 #22 TELECOM Digest Tue, 27 Jan 98 18:09:00 EST Volume 18 : Issue 22 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls (Eric Ewanco) Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls (Mark Atwood) Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls (Robert Holloman, Jr.) Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls (Dan Seyb) Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls (ljm3@lehigh.edu) Re: Bell Atlantic Wants Fees on ISPs (Michael D. Sullivan) Re: How Do They Know It's A Pay Phone? (Jason Argonauta) Re: AT&T Credit Calls - No VISA (Stanley Cline) 800 Line or "Regular" Line? (Cliff Scheller) Who Allocates Numbers With # and *? (Walt Daniels) Employment Opportunity: Arabic, Indonesian, Russian Engineers (C. Scholz) Remote Telephone Service (Paul Genovese) Re: AOL Accuses Navy of Tricking it to Get Data (Larry Finch) Carrier ID Codes (John R. Levine) Current Carrier Identification Codes (David M. Kurtiak) 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@telecom-digest.org * The Digest is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson of Skokie, Illinois USA. 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Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Eric Ewanco Subject: Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls Date: 27 Jan 1998 14:16:00 -0500 Organization: 3Com [this post represents strictly my own opinions] Meridian sells a very cool phone (which I own) which integrates a digital answering machine, a telephone, and a caller ID box all in one. It has the virtue of doing intelligent things with caller ID information and digital answering. For example, you can assign different numbers to different outgoing message groups and different mailboxes. You can even assign unique greetings to individual calling numbers. I have all my friends assigned to a single mailbox, with a message which can tell them specifically where I am. If I am out for the weekend, I can say that without fearing that someone casing my house will call and get it. You can also record voice tag announcements for callers, and it will play the tag when they call (so you don't have to go through the effort of looking at the display). For those who do not have the Caller ID name option, you can configure names for every known number which it displays in lieu of the number. But about your desired feature. It has a feature I've been employing recently where you can record a specific outgoing message for private callers. Mine says, "Anonymous caller: Please make a note to dial *82 before calling this number. Please identify yourself and your number at the tone, or you may leave a message if you choose." When you enable private caller screening, it picks up the phone on the first ring only for private callers, then plays the private caller message. If the caller calls back with caller ID unblocked, it lets it ring the regular number of times, and if you don't answer, plays the different message assigned either to that person's calling number or to the general outgoing message. (Unfortunately you have to enable private caller screening in order to get it to play the private caller message; otherwise it plays the general message.) The phone has lots of other neat features; of course the answering machine messages are keyed by caller ID name/number/time, so many callers needn't leave any information except a note to return their call, since you already know who they are, their number, and the time they called. You can program it like a voice response system, where callers can hear different messages by keying in one of the touch-tone digits. It can be programmed to dial you at another number and deliver messages when it gets one. It has a speakerphone, a call timer, programmable buttons, hold, release, dialing directory, auto fax switching, remote touch-tone access, intercom/paging capability, up to 30 minutes of digital recording, and lots of obscure but neat features I can't presently remember. The only downside to it is that its digital recording is compressed out the wazoo using a lossy algorithm, which means that you sacrifice a substantial degree of quality. These phones are available from Radio Shack under the Sprint brand name. # __ __ Eric Ewanco # IC | XC eje@world.std.com # ---+--- http://www.wp.com/Eric_Ewanco # NI | KA Framingham, MA; USA ------------------------------ From: Mark Atwood Subject: Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls Date: 27 Jan 1998 15:05:57 -0500 Organization: Ampersand, Inc. roy@mchip00.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: > I'm reminded of a Dr. Zeuss story. Something about the greeches with > stars on their bellies. Seems there was a community of greeches (or > whatever fanciful species name the good doctor had dreamed up for this > story) and along comes a guy with a machine which will paste a star on > greech bellies, for a buck a belly. After a while, half the greeches > have stars and half don't, and factions form. Mommy star-bellied > greeches won't let their kids play with the non-star variety, since > they are obviously inferior. Eventually everybody has stars, and they > need to find some other way to be better, so the same guy starts > charging a buck a belly to run them through his latest invention, the > star-remover machine. Well, you know the rest. Dr Seuss. "The Star-Bellied Sneeches" was a parable about racial discrimination and racial pride. It is in the collection "The Lorax and Other Tales", and has been animated and is availabe on video, I think. (The title story "The Lorax", a parable about deforestation, triggered a round of embarrasing litigation and political grandstanding in the US's Pacific Northwest when some school teachers started using it as a reading assignment.) Mark Atwood | Thank you gentlemen, you are everything we have come to zot@ampersand.com | expect from years of government training. -- MIB Zed ------------------------------ From: Robert Holloman, Jr. Subject: Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 16:02:18 -0500 Organization: MindSpring Enterprises Reply-To: holloman@pobox.com Roy A. McCrory wrote: > A very nice summary, Pat! But one related, very annoying issue - > out-of-area calls. Is there any practicable way to stop these. In my > area (Mountain Bell - US West of New Mexico) virtually all the > telemarketers that 'serve' me have the phone company set their CID to > out-of-area. Let me know if there is any way to deal with those -- > other than ignoring them after racing to the CID box! JunkBusters () has tons of free information on how to get rid of telemarketers. The main thing to remember is always tell them to put your number on their "don't call list." I've been doing that for a few months now and have noticed a marked drop in calls. Ignoring them just causes their computer to continue calling back, sometimes several times a day. It can be fun going through the "anti-telemarketing script" with teledroids, but that gets old after the first few times. Lately, many of my telescum conversations have gone something like this: Me: Hello? Them: Me: Hello? Them: Hello, may I speak with Mr. or Mrs. Robert Holloman please? Me: Please, add, this, number, to, your, DO NOT, call, list. Them: Yes sir, I have added your number to the list. If you have any questions or concerns, please call 1-8xx-xxx-xxxx. Thank you for your time. Me: Thank you. I don't give 'em a chance to tell me who they are or why they're calling. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls Reply-To: d.seyb@telesciences.com Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 10:15:26 -0500 From: Dan Seyb As an alternative to fighting your local telco, Radio Shack sold a Caller ID box that could be 'told' to reject all private calls. I bought mine about a year and a half ago, but I would imagine they are still available. For whatever it may be worth. dan ------------------------------ From: ljm3@lehigh.edu Subject: Re: Stopping Annoying "Private" Calls Date: 27 Jan 1998 16:51:11 -0500 In article , Michael E. Costello writes: > We have been getting numerous calls which are showing up on our > caller ID as "Private". The person or persons who are making these > calls are hanging up all of the time without leaving a message. I'm > not sure if they aren't scouting us out to find out when we are home. > My question is: Is there a box I can attach to our phone line which > will identify these "Private" calls (that shouldn't be difficult > since the caller ID already does that), answers the phone > immediately, and responds with a message informing the caller that > our line does not accept unidentified callers, and if they want to > get through, they need to unblock their number. If there is such a > box, I would like to know about it. Has anyone heard of such a > thing? I got a fancy Sprint phone from RadioShack which has CID plus a bunch of other features. Among them is one which detects a private call and cuts it off after one ring if you set it up that way. So I tried, and discovered that it blocks calls from my daughter's cell phone. Testing, I found it does the same with mine. Apparently it is fairly common that cell phones don't transmit CID. I haven't found a way of distinguishing between them and telemarketers. Al McLennan [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Cell phones and telemarketers transmit 'outside' when they call. Persons who block their ID transmit as 'private'. Surely your phone should know the difference, considering how expensive they are (I saw the phone at the Radio Shack near my house recently.) You want to block the privates, not the outsides. And actually, in some places cell phones are now starting to give ID as well. Ameritech cellular service gives caller-id, and has done so for several months. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Michael D. Sullivan Subject: Re: Bell Atlantic Wants Fees on ISPs Date: Mon, 26 Jan 98 23:00:11 -0400 Organization: DIGEX, Inc. Reply-To: Michael D. Sullivan On 21 Jan 1998 05:32:20 GMT, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > On Tue, 20 Jan 1998 17:00:00 EST, TELECOM Digest Editor > wrote: >> Tuesday's edition of the Bell Atlantic news (800-647-NEWS) announced >> that BA has gone to court asking the Court of Appeals to overturn the >> decision of a lower court giving (what Bell Atlantic called) a 'free >> ride' to ISPs regarding carrier access/network fees, etc. They went to >> court in St. Louis to get this matter heard. They are asking the court >> to force ISPs to 'pay their fair share' based on their volume of >> traffic over local telco lines. This is a separate and distinct matter >> not connected with the 'modem tax' proposals we are always hearing >> about. This is something Bell-Atlantic has cooking on its own. The >> rationale given in the telephone news report was that BA has spent >> an enormous amount of money upgrading its s equipment just to keep up >> with the fast-moving pace of the Internet and its users. They say >> they need the money since the ISPs s have 'forced them to upgrade.' > Alas, it's not in that court's jurisdiction. > This was dealt with last year, and the FCC apparently feels it has the > right to reserve jurisdiction on the topic of access fees, and this is > what I sent to all my correspondents on the topic: [snippage about FCC not having open docket on this, which is true] > Basically, the Circuit court would have to overrule the FCC. I'm not > sure they can actually even do that, since the FCC holds inclusive > venue, being a federal, rather than merely circuit, agency, but IANAL. Actually, Bell Atlantic *is* asking the 8th Circuit to overrule the FCC's decision not to impose access charges on ISPs. BA and other companies sought court review of the FCC's access charge decision, and the appeals were consolidated in the 8th Circuit. So the 8th Circuit *does* have jurisdiction to review this decision, but the most it can do is find the FCC's decision unjustified or unlawful and send it back for further proceedings. The court cannot impose access charges on ISPs by itself. Michael D. Sullivan, Bethesda, Maryland, USA mds@access.digex.net, avogadro@well.com ------------------------------ From: jargonauta@hotmail.com (Jason Argonauta) Subject: Re: How Do They Know It's A Pay Phone? Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 18:23:35 GMT Organization: The Vellocino Greg Monti wrote: > WorldCom and other carriers identify payphone calls using "info > digits" received from the local phone companies along with the call. > However, the FCC's order recently excused a number of local phone > companies from providing the required "info digits" on all calls. As > a result, WorldCom and other long distance carriers cannot immediatly > identify payphone calls, but the FCC has threatened that WorldCom will > still have to pay for these calls. As an example, one of the info > digits passed from payphones is "07." Since this digit is also used > for other types of phones with restricted lines, and pending further > FCC action, WorldCom will apply the $0.30 payphone surcharge to calls > from these lines. I went to the FCC web site to try to look for a definition of pay phone to no avail. If you go to www.nanpa.org and then to ANI II digits, you would see that pay phones are 27 and 70, and that 07 (Special Operator Handling Required) does not mention pay phone at all. But real life shows that about half the time the info digits for a pay phone are 07. And sometimes non-pay phones, like hotels, also come with 07. So the FCC mandates pay phone compensation (what makes sense), but does not define what a pay phone is, and does not provide a way to know when a call is from a pay phone, nor how to locate the pay phone operator to send him the check. I believe that the FCC should 1. Define what a pay phone is (public use, accept coins...) 2. To receive the compensation make the pay phone operator broadcast the 27 info digit (no compensation for 07) and 3. It should be kept in a NANPA database, where everybody could have access to the information (to send the checks). TransWorld Telecom ------------------------------ From: roamer1@pobox.com (Stanley Cline) Subject: Re: AT&T Credit Calls - No VISA Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 06:34:49 GMT Organization: By area code and prefix (NPA-NXX) Reply-To: roamer1@pobox.com CORRECTION: I wrote ... > AFAICT, Visa simply doesn't want its cards used as a "calling card", > unless it goes through VisaPhone (whose service is provided by MCI) -- ^^^ Nope, it's not MCI -- it's Sprint that provides VisaPhone's network services. I was thinking of American Express, who does use MCI for a similar service. AFAIK, neither MasterCard nor Novus/Discover offer a similar calling card feature. Stanley Cline (IRC:Roamer1).....Telecommunications & Consumer Advocacy Chattanooga & Atlanta..............(no spam!) roamer1[at]pobox[dot]com main web page.......................http://scline.home.mindspring.com/ the payphone page....................http://cocot.home.mindspring.com/ ------------------------------ From: Cliff Scheller Organization: http://www.compuquestinc.com Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 07:27:42 -0600 Subject: 800 Line or "Regular" Line? As you all know "800" inbound calls route to ring on "regular" lines. Is anyone aware of a device that can inform the recipient whether the call is arriving as an 800 call or as a call to the regular number? Cliff Scheller cliff@compuquestinc.com "Turn your Pager into a Remote Monitoring System" http://www.compuquestinc.com ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jan 1998 09:32:12 EST From: dan@watson.ibm.com (Walt Daniels) Subject: Who Allocates Numbers With # and *? Looking at NANPA I cannot find anything about phone numbers with # and *. I know the phone companies understand some of them, but which ones? For instance I have two lines at home and one of them was dead for almost two days (unknown problem). So the phone company setup a transfer of the dead number to the working one and told me to hit 73# or maybe it was 76# to cancel the forwarding when the line started working again. Are these kinds of numbers allocated or do they vary by phone company? Are there any reserved numbers that will always be ignored by the phone company, e.g. ##anything? E-mail replys to wdaniels@bestweb.net. This account is only working for another week. ------------------------------ From: Christoph Scholz Subject: Employment Opportunity: Arabic, Indonesian, Russian Engineers Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 19:05:16 -0500 Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology Our company is responsible for telephone application translations for such companies as Motorola, Nortel, Harris and others. Our non-telephony clients include CNN, GTE, Coca-Cola, Rolls Royce, Turner Broadcasting and more. Currently, we are working on a very large prompt script translation for Motorola. The document contains 1,500 prompts/phrases to be recorded in 16 countries. Approximately 20,000 words. We need engineers experienced in telephony who know the newest terminology and vocabulary in those countries to review documents translated by experienced technical translators. For more information on our company, you may visit our website at: http://www.internationalservices.com Please email information on your experience to my private email address: SEReager@aol.com Thank you very much. S. E. Reager, President, International Services ---------------------------- Christoph J. Scholz OCPN (Optical Communications and Photonic Network) Laboratory UCSB (University of California in Santa Barbara) GaTech (Georgia Institute of Technology) http://www.ece.gatech.edu/users/chrischo (404) 894-9919 (phone), (404) 894-8314 (lab), (404) 894-2700 (fax) ------------------------------ From: Paul Genovese Subject: Remote Telephone Service Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 08:29:27 -0700 Organization: Dimensional Communications Reply-To: genovpw@dimensional.com I knew a guy who lived in a cabin up in the Pacific NW about 40 miles from the nearest copper phone line yet you could call him, the phone would ring, and he'd answer. Now the quality of the transmission was well, kinda like an AM radio broadcast with all kinds of transient noise and such but did the job nevertheless. Anyone have any ideas on what kind of telephone system he had? And, where can I get one? ------------------------------ From: Larry Finch Subject: Re: AOL Accuses Navy of Tricking it to Get Data Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 19:47:20 -0500 Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services Tad Cook wrote: > AOL accuses Navy of tricking it to get data > By Jim Wolf > WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Internet service provider America Online > accused the U.S. Navy Wednesday of duping it into disclosing data on a > subscriber now at the center of a wide-reaching privacy lawsuit. > > In a statement, AOL said the Navy "deliberately ignored both federal > law and well-established procedures for handling government inquiries" > and used trickery instead in the case of Senior Chief Petty Officer > Timothy McVeigh. ----------------------snip------------------------- As a followup to this story, AOL later admitted that they should not have give personal information to anyone and that they had violated their own terms of service by doing so. There is a link today on AOL's signon screen to a letter from Steve Case in which he essentially eats crow. Larry LarryFinch@aol.com LarryFinch@worldnet.att.net larry@prolifics.com ------------------------------ Date: 27 Jan 1998 18:30:19 -0000 From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Carrier ID Codes Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg, N.Y. > Speaking of 10XXX codes, where can I find a more current source for > the various LD Carrier access codes besides the one in the Telecom > Archives? You go to the source -- visit http://www.nanpa.com. In the bar at the left side of the screen, click the + next to "Number resource info", and in the list that appears, you'll see "Carrier Identification Codes". Click that and you get a page with links to the current lists, sorted in various useful ways. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47 ------------------------------ From: David M. Kurtiak Subject: Current Carrier Identification Codes Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 13:47:28 -0500 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That particular section of the > archives is out of date and needs updating, I must admit. If > someone has a newer version of the carrier codes file perhaps > they will kindly pass it along. PAT] Pat: Current carrier identification codes are available directly from the FCC's web site at: "http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/Locato r/ldc1q97.pdf" The latest release on their site appears to be from early 1997. Lots of other information such as carrier contact numbers and market share reports are also available at: "http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/ixc.ht ml" Hope this helps! Dave Kurtiak dkurtiak@att.com AT&T, Piscataway, NJ ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V18 #22 *****************************