Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id AAA22813; Thu, 8 Jan 1998 00:46:11 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 00:46:11 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199801080546.AAA22813@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V18 #4 TELECOM Digest Thu, 8 Jan 98 00:46:00 EST Volume 18 : Issue 4 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson LA 911 Outage (Jay R. Ashworth) Wireless World Competition (Wireless Guru) Advance Program: SPIE/ACM Multimedia Computing and Networking 98 (K Jeffay) Re: 101XXXX Implementation Schedule (Chris Boone) Re: 101XXXX Implementation Schedule (Mark J. Cuccia) Re: AOL Victorious Over Spammer (Kim Brennan) 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. You can reach us by postal mail, fax or phone at: Post Office Box 4621 Skokie, IL USA 60076 Phone: 847-727-5427 Fax: 773-539-4630 ** Article submission address: editor@telecom-digest.org ** Our archives are available for your review/research. 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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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1997 10:38:41 -0500 From: Jay R. Ashworth Subject: LA 911 Outage Organization: Ashworth & Associates, St Pete FL USA From the AP wire, with comment: LOS ANGELES (AP) - A failed switch caused the 911 emergency telephone system to go down for nearly two hours in the nation's second largest city on December 30. No unusual levels of crime or fire were reported during the failure Tuesday night as police scrambled to divert calls to local stations and the fire department sent helicopters aloft to scout for any signs of trouble. _Helicopters?_ Police routed calls through a backup system that uses shortwave radio. The city Fire Department apparently experienced a systemwide 911 breakdown and used alternative local telephone numbers that were broadcast over local media. "The system failed, but the people behind the system ... immediately placed backup plans into effect, similar to what they would do after an earthquake," said fire spokesman Brian Humphrey. Pacific Bell technicians determined the breakdown was caused by a switch failure in a number of circuits that all converge at the downtown dispatch center. The traditional single point of failure. This was, presumably, the tandem to which the LA PSAP connects? The Sheriff's Department's 911 system was operating, but people who heard about the problems clogged agency lines, Deputy Henry Garza said. ... but if it _was_ the tandem, how could this be true? Perhaps the county PSAP dies, and LASD operates another one? Police Capt. Mike Downing, who commands the city's Central Dispatch Center, said calls were rerouted to 18 local police divisions. The downtown dispatch center handles between 5,000 and 10,000 calls per day. I suspect "rerouted" is not the proper term, if the "911 system" actually "failed". A similar breakdown occurred last month. Which leads us to wonder what sort of failure mode analysis is being done? Are there different failures, or are the solutions not being figured out correctly ... or are the solutions simply not being _implemented_, and if not, why not? In the early hours of Nov. 10, hundreds of police officers lost normal radio communications with the city's 911 dispatchers for several hours due to a technical malfunction, possibly in a battery-charging system. Again, single point of failure ... Are there any readers to either digest situated to comment in more depth? The piece carries an AP copyright; I hope this has constituted fair use through commentary. ;-) And Happy New Year, y'all! Cheers, Jay R. Ashworth High Technology Systems Consulting Ashworth Designer Linux: Where Do You Want To Fly Today? & Associates ka1fjx/4 Crack. It does a body good. +1 813 790 7592 jra@baylink.com http://rc5.distributed.net NIC: jra3 ------------------------------ From: pbdevine@NOSPAM.aol.com (Wireless Guru) Subject: Wireless World Competition Date: Wed, 07 Jan 1998 08:01:21 GMT Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd. During mid-December a California man was arrested for espionage in Russia. News reports say the man was a technician for a wireless phone company, installing equipment in Russia. Here's the news behind the news: Although probably not a spy, this man is more like a prisoner of war. The war is a global war being fought over which company will supply most of the world with wireless digital phones. The competition is so intense -- not just in Russia, but also in China, Latin America, and the rest of the world -- that it has now come to this: People being arrested and imprisoned. The stakes are huge: 2/3 of the world has never used a phone. And phone companies from American and Europe are fighting to be the ones to build equipment for this multi-billion dollar industry. Attached is a piece from Don Bauder, the Business Editor of the {San Diego Union}, and a column that appeared in the {LA Daily News} a month or so ago, which gives some good detail about what is at stake -- and why this battle is so important -- important enough, apparently, to put someone in prison. I have also included a link to a site that contains several other pieces documenting this fermenting war. There is also a link to a site that has been documenting this escalating war. ---------------------------------------------------- DON BAUDER Business Editor The San Diego Union 03-Oct-1997 Friday The grass is always greener ... on the other side of the ocean. Consider Qualcomm, San Diego's fast-growing telecommunications company. It competes vigorously with Ericsson, a Swedish concern. Ericsson pushes its Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) technology. Qualcomm pushes its newer Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology. Recently, Expressen, a newspaper in Stockholm, Sweden, took its hometown giant to task. TDMA, and its Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) derivative, might be out of date, warned the paper's writer, stating ominously, "Thirty thousand jobs can disappear when the new technology (CDMA) takes over." Commented the author, "More and more experts are now asking themselves: Has Ericsson gone for the wrong technique?" A Stockholm stock analyst predicts Ericsson shares might fall. A Wall Street analyst expresses the same fears. The article quotes an unnamed insider at Ericsson, who says the company should push the older TDMA now, and then switch to CDMA later. "CDMA is the technology of the future," declares the article. Ericsson, which once denounced CDMA, now claims it owns important rights to the technology, says the publication, quoting a Qualcomm executive saying that Ericsson doesn't even have a license for CDMA. Ah, but a prophet is seldom appreciated at home. Qualcomm is getting bad press here -- specifically, in the Sept. 8 issue of the magazine Telephony. "Of the numerous manufacturers of CDMA, Qualcomm is among the smallest," says the magazine. "The number of people in the world with CDMA phones is dwarfed by the millions who are using other types." The magazine did a long study of CDMA, and concluded that its capacity is far less than advertised, it has problems when subscriber growth is burgeoning and it "is far from being as mature as other digital wireless technologies." Says the publication, "Unfortunately, any meaningful dialogue among operators and vendors to solve inherent problems in the standard has been muted by a crusade to establish CDMA as a viable technology at all costs." Discussions of ways to correct the problems in Qualcomm's system "have been intentionally suppressed while the benefits have been hyped beyond all reason," says Telephony. Then in a long discussion, the magazine asks whether Qualcomm's version of CDMA costs too much in relation to its benefits. The question of whether Qualcomm "will ever carry home the trophy of digital wireless champion is far from certain," says Telephony. Forbes, however, offers a bit of a mea culpa in its Oct. 6 issue. "We were skeptical" about CDMA, says the magazine, referring to a late 1995 story. Now, however, "CDMA has caught on surprisingly fast," says the magazine. CDMA should have 45 percent of the U.S. mobile phone market by 2004, according to the Yankee Group consulting firm, says Forbes. ***************************************************** For a complete reprint of the Espressen article of June '97 and other related postings, go to: Digital Wireless Phone Digest ****************************************************** >From Los Angeles Daily News "FAST-TRACK" MASKS REAL ISSUE: U.S. BUSINESSES AHEAD OF THE GOVERNMENT IN CREATING JOBS; FREE TRADE THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP IT UP by Brian P. Devine 11/08/97 FORGET NAFTA and "fast-track." That's not the biggest story on international trade. By itself, fast-track won't create one job or make one sale for an American company. Only American companies can do that. And they are - all over the world. Including companies from Southern California. The troubling part of the fast-track debate is that some people believe that international trade is bad for America and American jobs. And that is a bigger story than the NAFTA/fast-track controversy. It's clear from the "Stop foreign trade, save American jobs" tenor of the discussion over fast-track that many people are not aware of how many American jobs are created right now through trade. For example, around the world, American companies are waging a good old fashioned trade war over a new kind of telephone called wireless digital phones. All Americans need to know about this new war is that telephone companies in America, Europe and Asia are drooling over the two-thirds of the people on this planet who have never used a telephone. And providing billions of new phones for the world will create hundreds of thousands of jobs - either here, or in Europe and Asia. So the stakes are huge. Traditional phone systems require copper, roads, wire, technical expertise, laws, and other infrastructure that we take for granted, but that most of the world simply does not have. Perhaps a part of a country is too remote, or mountainous, or wire laid in the morning is stolen by the next day. Whatever the reason, for the first time, phone companies around the world think the new wireless digital phone systems will enable them to provide phones to these people. Billions of phones. That is because these new wireless digital phones are so powerful that countries will not need the roads, copper, and much of the other infrastructure to install them. Just a few base stations and handsets. Wireless digital phones are instant infrastructure. A quantum leap that, for many countries, will be the most important piece of industrial infrastructure they will ever get. An instant passport into the Information Age. But not all wireless phones are created equal - and here is where the battle begins for American companies. Countries around the world are deciding - even as you read this - whether to use the newer, more powerful, American-backed standard, called CDMA; or the 20-year-old European standard, variously called TDMA or GSM. The European companies like the TDMA standard because they've been using it for more than a decade. It's not as powerful as its American counterpart, but it is more familiar. And because Europeans have billions invested in this technology - that although outdated, they think is good enough for some of the less demanding countries of the Third World - they are going to fight to get the most they can out of this investment. But if {The Wall Street Journal} is to be believed, the Europeans may be fighting a losing battle. {The Wall Street Journal} recently reported that South Korea had created tens of thousands of jobs and become a telecommunications powerhouse in Asia because it had backed, early on, the American CDMA standard. Other journals report TDMA systems in Europe cause problems with medical devices such as pacemakers and hearing aids. (So much so that one wag says that TDMA really stands for Terminally Disables Medical Appliances.) In journals and newspapers across the U.S. and in Sweden, Mexico, Brazil and Korea, the drumbeat for the American CDMA technology is getting louder and louder as its superiority is demonstrated over and over throughout the world. One of the biggest proponents of TDMA is in Sweden. But even this company's hometown paper, Expressen, recently reported that Swedish telecom engineers and others fear that Sweden will lose 30,000 jobs because their country's most important export is based on a soon-to-be obsolete technology. All this has little to do with NAFTA. Left to their own devices, American companies are quite capable of winning this war over telecommunications standards. The most troubling aspect of the NAFTA/fast-track debate is that American politicians in Washington seem to be uncertain about our place in the world economy. That means, more than just raising or lowering a few tariffs, our leaders may not be devoting the resources to the educational and trade infrastructure that will help our companies compete in the global economy. That's bigger than NAFTA, more important than fast-track and the biggest reason why hundreds of thousands of Americans will be creating products for export around the globe. Or not. ------------------------------ From: jeffay@cs.unc.edu (Kevin Jeffay) Subject: Advance Program: SPIE/ACM Multimedia Computing and Networking '98 Date: 7 Jan 1998 19:28:00 -0500 Organization: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Advance Program & Call for Participation SPIE/ACM MULTIMEDIA COMPUTING AND NETWORKING 1998 San Jose, California January 26-28 1998 Conference Kevin Jeffay, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Chairs Dilip Kandlur, IBMJT.J. Watson Research Center Timothy Roscoe, Persimmon I.T., Inc. Program Peter Beadle, University of Wollongong Committee Ming-Syan Chen, National Taiwan University Wu-Chi Feng, Ohio State University Martin Freeman, Philips Research J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, U.C. Santa Cruz Anoop Gupta, Stanford University Mark Hayter, DEC Systems Research Center Sugih Jamin, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor Paul Jardetzky, Sun Microsystems Chuck Kalmanek, AT&T Research Ian Leslie, University of Cambridge Sape Mullender, University of Twente Klara Nahrstedt U.I. Urbana-Champaign Guru Parulkar, Washington University Lawrence A. Rowe, U.C. Berkeley Debanjan Saha, IBM T.J. Watson Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University Doug Shepherd, Lancaster University Brian Smith, Cornell University Cormac Sreenan, AT&T Research Ralf Steinmetz, T.U. Darmstadt Harrick Vin, University of Texas at Austin Jonathan Walpole, Oregon Graduate Institute Raj Yavatkar, Intel Corporation Hui Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University Registration & hotel info can be found at URL: http://www.spie.org/web/meetings/programs/pw98/ei98_home.html +------------------------------------+ | | | Register by January 7, 1998 for | | for early registration discount!! | | | +------------------------------------+ MMCN '98 ADVANCE PROGRAM ----------------------- Monday 26 January 8.45 am: Welcome and Opening Remarks 9.00 to 10.30 am: Session 1: Multimedia System Development Tools Middleware support for distributed multimedia and collaborative computing, K. Birman, R. Friedman, M. Hayden, Cornell Univ.; I. Rhee, Emory Univ. Multiplatform simulation of video playout performance, L. Gharai, R. Gerber, Univ. of Maryland/College Park A Software-only video production switcher for the Internet MBone, T.H. Wong, K. D. Mayer-Patel, D. Simpson, L. A. Rowe, Univ. of California/Berkeley 11.00 am to 12.30 pm: Session 2: Operating Systems I Applying statistical process controls to the adaptive rate control problem: a framework for the streaming of hetergeneous streams, N. R. Manobar, M. H. Willebeek-LeMair, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Ctr.; A. Prakash, Univ. of Michigan/Ann Arbor An integrated input/output system for kernel data streaming, F. W. Miller, S. K. Tripathi, Univ. of Maryland/College Park Measurement-based admission control and resource allocation for multimedia applications, N. Stratford, P. Barham,S. Crosby, F. Toomey, M. Huggard, Univ. of Cambridge (UK) Lunch Break 2.00 to 3.30 pm: Keynote Address: Enhanced Display Environments for Telecollaboration and Personal Computing in the Office of the Future Henry Fuchs, Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science, Univ. of North Carolina/Chapel Hill 4.00 to 5.30 pm: Session 3: Video-on-Demand Supporting interactive scanning operations in VoD systems, G. Apostolopoulos, Univ. of Maryland/College Park; M. Krunz, Univ of Arizona; S. K. Tripathi, Univ. of Maryland/College Park Modelling prerecorded compressed video streams for fast bandwidth smoothing implementations, W. C. Feng, M. Liu, C. C. Lam, The Ohio State Univ. A system for demonstrating dynamic service aggregation in VoD scenarios, P. Basu, A. Narayanan, R. Krishnan, T. D. C. Little, Boston Univ. Tuesday 27 January 8.30 to 9.15 am: Plenary Speaker Multimedia Communications: What's Next? Leonardo Chiariglione, CSELT/Telecom Italia (Italy) 9.30 to 11.00 am: Session 4: Operating Systems II Symphony: an integrated multimedia file system, P. J. Shenoy, P. Goyal, S. S. Rao, H. M. Vin, Univ. of Texas/Austin Adaptive prefetching for device independent file I/O, D. Revel, D. McNamee, D. Steere, J. Walpole, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology Resource kernels: a resoure-centric approach to real-time and multimedia systems, R. Rajkumar, K. Juvva, A. Molano, S Oikawa, Carnegie Mellon Univ. 11.15 am to 12.45 pm: Session 5: The World Wide Web Characterizing videos on the World Wide Web, S. Acharya, B. C. Smith, Cornell Univ. Static caching of Web servers, Z. Liu, P. Nain, N. Niclausse, INRIA Ctr. Sophia Antipolis (France); D. Towsley, Univ. of Massachusetts/Amherst Resource-based caching for Web servers, R. Tewari, H. M. Vin, Univ. of Texas/Austin; A. Dan, D. Sitaram, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Ctr. Lunch/Exhibit Break 2.00 to 3.30 pm: Keynote Address: Low Latency Media Delivery in a Consumer Internet Service Michael Schwartz, Director of Server Engineering and Senior Scientist, @Home Network 4.00 to 5.30 pm: Session 6: Multimedia Applications Integrated audio-visual processing for object serialization and tracking, G. S. Pingali, Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs. Accelerating M-JPEG compression with temporal information, H. Boenisch, K. Froitzheim, P. Schulthess, Univ. Ulm (FRG) Cross-model retrieval of scripted speech audio, C. B. Owen, F. Makedon, Dartmouth College Wednesday 28 January 8:30 to 9:15am: Plenary Speaker The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet Alan Kay, Disney Fellow and Vice President of Research and Development, The Walt Disney Company 9.30 to 11.30 am: Session 7: Flow and congestion control Adaptive source rate control for wireless video conferencing, H. Liu, M. El Zarki, Univ. of Pennsylvania Flow and congestion control for internet streaming applications, S. Cen, C. Pu, J. Walpole, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology Invited Paper 11.30am to 1.00 pm: Panel Discussion: The Future of Multimedia Research, Or, What Am I Doing And Why? Moderator: Lawrence A. Rowe, University of California/Berkeley ------------------------------ From: Christopher W. Boone Subject: Re: 101XXXX Implementation Schedule Date: Wed, 07 Jan 1998 20:26:55 -0600 Organization: The Walt Disney Company / ABC Radio Networks Dallas, Texas Reply-To: cboone@earthlink.net Tom Crofford wrote: > What is the current schedule for implementing the new 101XXXX carrier > access codes? I believe there was a previous thread here regarding > implementation during the Summer of '98. I'm looking for confirmation > of the timetable. From what I saw on the FCC News Digest I get from the Commission, the 4 digit IXC codes were supposed to go into permissive dialing as of Jan 1, 1998, with end of permissive dialing sometime in June I think...I'll go back over it and post the info here ... a lot of small telcos have asked for and got relief from the start of permissive dialing ... but I think end of permissive dialing is a set date and noone has been granted a waiver ... YET! Chris ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 08 Jan 1998 08:55:51 -0600 From: Mark J. Cuccia Subject: Re: 101XXXX Implementation Schedule Tom Crofford wrote: > What is the current schedule for implementing the new 101XXXX > carrier access codes? I believe there was a previous thread here > regarding implementation during the Summer of '98. I'm looking for > confirmation of the timetable. Actually, the question should be 'what is the mandatory date of when existing 10-XXX+ CACs _must_ be dialed as 101-0XXX+'. For about two (maybe three) years now, there _have_ been assigned CACs of the new format 101-XXXX+ in the 101-5XXX+ and 101-6XXX+ ranges. And since that time two or three years ago, where the new format has been dialable, existing 10-XXX+ CACs _have_ been _permissively_ dialable as 101-0XXX+. In Spring 1997, the FCC mandated that as of January 1998, existing 10-XXX+ CACs must disappear, becoming mandatory dialable as 101-0XXX+. However, due to many replies (complaints) of resellers and other telecom entities, this past Fall (October 1997, IIRC), the FCC extended the date of mandatory dialing until the Summer of 1998, in the June/July 1998 timeframe. There is information on this at the FCC's website (http://www.fcc.gov), in various downloadable files at the "Common Carrier Bureau" section. While the FCC's mandates apply "de-jure" only to the US portions of the NANP (this includes Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, and Guam and the Mariana Islands in the Pacific - all of which have "Feature-Group-D Equal Access"), since Canada is also an _integral_ part of the NANP (and using the same pool of fg.D CACs/CICs), this FCC mandate would apply "de-facto" to the Canadian portion of the industry. Canada's own industry forums (such as the CSCN, Canadian Steering Committe on Numbering) and regulatory (CRTC) have been aware of the matter and have been 'mirroring' what is presently taking place in the US, regarding the expansion. The "non-US" but still NANP Caribbean (including Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, and other "British" islands of the Caribbean), AFAIK, don't have fg.D "Equal Access", at least not yet. But since they do participate in the NANP, 10(1X)XXX+ CACs are available to them for originating access if they ever decide to implement originating fg.D "Equal Access". And "Caribbean-based" NANP carriers/entities/etc. can also apply to NANPA for their _own_ 101-XXXX+ CACs, available from the same NANP pool. Since there had been _no_ assigned 10-XXX+ CACs of the format 10-10X+, 10-15X+, 10-16X+, it was possible for Bellcore and the Industry to develop an expansion program, back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. However, I _don't_ yet know when NANPA (soon to be Lockheed-Martin) will begin assigning _new_ CACs format ranges 101-1XXX+ thru 101-4XXX+, and 101-7XXX+ thru 101-9XXX+. HOPEFULLY, enough players in the Industry (particularly COCOTs, Cellular, PBX, etc., as well as smaller 'independent' LECs) will have made existing 10-XXX+ CACs _mandatory_ dialable as 101-0XXX+ _BEFORE_ any _additional_ ranges of 101-XXXX+ CACs become activated! MARK_J._CUCCIA__PHONE/WRITE/WIRE/CABLE:__HOME:__(USA)__Tel:_CHestnut-1-2497 WORK:__mcuccia@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu|4710-Wright-Road|__(+1-504-241-2497) Tel:UNiversity-5-5954(+1-504-865-5954)|New-Orleans-28__|fwds-on-no-answr-to Fax:UNiversity-5-5917(+1-504-865-5917)|Louisiana(70128)|cellular/voicemail- ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 10:44:12 -0500 From: kim@aol.com (Kim Brennan) Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Re: AOL Victorious Over Spammer The Editor continues: > And sadly, Steve Case and AOL have never had, since the early days of > that service, exactly a sterling reputation. I don't know how long > *you* have been a member there, but let me tell you the years past > have seen lots of mischief originate at aol.com, admittedly by users > as well as staff members and government agents. Users are not all I've been a AOL member for ten years. > angels by any means, but AOL's lack of any security at all for many > years was a netwide scandal. 'Screen names' were valid one day and > gone the next, with little or no way to audit or backtrack on who said > what. I can still subscribe there, set up a screen name to pollute the > net with one day and kill the screen name the next, letting complaint > mail bounce all over the place. Hmm, as I recall, AOL's email only got access to the internet circa five years ago. Yep, the marketing of accounts which were free for one month had detrimental aspects from an internet standpoint. The benefit for AOL was that there were a small number of bad apples in a large basket of new customers. As has been demonstrated with spammers, a few bad apples can cause ENORMOUS amounts of problems. Your basic complaint then hinges on your dislike of AOL's marketing scheme, which is designed to get as many people as possible to sign on to AOL with the minimum amount of hassles (security checks.) > It just seems to me Steve Case has always been *too friendly* with > government agents. Now, any responsible ISP will certainly respond to > a subpoena served upon him, a search warrant or wire tap order issued > legitimatly in response to the activities of some one or more > users. But with AOL it seems like instead of starting off with the > premise that they will respect their users' privacy as a default > arrangement, while making it relatively difficult to misbehave in an > undetected way (i.e. those ever-changing screen names) they instead > leave themselves wide open to every jerk who comes along and then > get the FBI to do the job *they* should be doing instead. PAT] I still see no evidence that Steve Case, aka AOL has been 'too friendly' with government agents. Cooperative in criminal cases, and as a guide in Parental controls situations, but I don't see where you get the idea that there is special treatment for government, call them spies, to entrap people. The whole AOL set up is such that ANYONE can be anonymous (not just government agents). Next you want AOL to do enforcement of laws, rather than the FBI (or other appropriate organizations). If that isn't an invasion of my privacy I don't know what is. The FBI, with proper jurisprudence is entitled to snoop IF there is reasonable cause. And AOL is entitled to request their assistance if they notice a problem. I remember several months ago a problem with inbound internet mail on AOL being EXTREMELY slow getting delivered. This was due to spam filtering, according to what I heard. It seems to me that what I read in your responses would lead to even worse performance on AOL in general to impliment the heavy security you seem to think AOL's service needs. I wonder how often people would use credit cards if it took 30-60 minutes to validate each purchase? Kim Brennan (kim@aol.com) Duo 2300c, Red VW Fox Wagon GL, Black VW Corrado SLC http://members.aol.com/kim Duo Information Page: http://members.aol.com/kim/computer/duo Questions should include "Duo" in the subject, else they'll be deleted unread [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Kim, you present some excellent responses to my original statements, and I am going to seriously consider what you have stated above. Perhaps I need to rethink some of my complaints about AOL. Thanks very much for responding. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V18 #4 ****************************