Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id AAA15059; Tue, 24 Mar 1998 00:02:23 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 24 Mar 1998 00:02:23 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199803240502.AAA15059@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V18 #44 TELECOM Digest Sun, 22 Mar 98 23:37:21 EST Volume 18 : Issue 42 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities (oldbear@arctos.com) Re: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities (Robert Gordon) Re: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities (Victor Escobar) Re: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities (Cortland Richmond) Re: 3000.00 Phone Bill HELP!!! (Mitchell L Franzos) Re: GSM PCMCIA Card Lets You Stay On-line (Wolf Paul) Re: PacBell's Response to Posted Complaint (John Dearing) 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: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 18:08:21 -0500 From: The Old Bear Subject: Re: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities In Telecom-Digest, Volume 18, Issue 39, Nathan Brophy wrote: > Date: Tue, 17 Mar 1998 12:03:18 -0600 > From: Nathan Brophy > Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom > Subject: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities > I am a college student majoring in MIS. I am currently doing research > to identify the top telecom and technology centric metropolitan areas > in the US. I know of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley but I am > looking for other less known metropolitan areas that also can be > considered top high bandwidth and high technology cities. I am also > interested in identifying various businesses that are drawn to and > depend on these metropolitan environments. > I would really appreciate if anyone could direct me to any helpful > trade magazines, prior research, or interesting relevant articles that > will assist me in identifying the top telecom and technology centric > metropolitan areas in the US. To quote Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter of the Harvard Business School: "... Silicon Valley no longer is unique and no longer is able to monopolize the development of new technology. Everyone is already talking about Silicon Gulch in Austin, Silicon Mountain in Colorado, Silicon Forest in Seatle, Silicon Bog in Ireland, and Silicon Glen in Scotland." Well, being slightly partisan to Boston (which Oliver Wendell Holmes called "The Hub of the Universe" long before the concept of network topology or silicon anything), I point you to: The Massachusetts Telecommunications Council URL: < http://www.masstel.org/ > The Massachusetts Telecommunications Council (MTC) began in 1993 with an ambitious yet straightforward mission: To promote Massachusetts as a world center for telecommunications by building on the extraordinarily high concentration of telecommunications organizations doing business in the state. Massachusetts currently is home to more than 1,000 telecommunications organizations employing well over 100,000 people. And for some good leads and an entertaining look at "Siliconia" -- the practice of calling any concentration of high-tech companies "Silicon Someplace", as in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara Country), Silicon Triangle (North Carolina) or Silicon Bog (Ireland), see Keith Dawson's fine web page at: URL: < http://www.tbtf.com/siliconia.html > And for a newspaper article citing several of these high tech regions and their competitive advantages (as well as Keith Dawson's web site), see the article at: URL: < http://cgi2.nando.net/newsroom/nao/biz/030297/bizt_21779.html > You may also want to look at regional eceonomic development issues related to telecom infrastructure but not necessarily to the telecom industry. That is, what kinds of industries make locational decisions based on the availability of telecommunications resources. One useful citation on this topic is a research paper by Mitchell Moss of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. It's title is "Telecommunications Policy and Cities" and you can find it on the web at: URL: < http://urban.nyu.edu/research/telecom-policy-cities/telecom.html > If you develop a comprehensive list, please post it and your conclusions back here in the Telecom Digest. Many of us would be interested in your findings. Here are a couple of items from the L.A. Times this week on this very topic: The Tech Coast: Orange County: Finding traces of silicon in suburbia By Barbara Marsh and P.J. Huffstutter March 19, 1998 For the last 15 years, the operative mentality in Orange County, California, has been: Build a tech center and the companies will follow. This plan has been hugely successful with the development of Irvine Spectrum, Irvine Co.'s field of dreams. But it's too soon to tell whether the massive business park will become -- as billed -- the next Silicon Valley. According to Donald Bren, the center's visionary founder and chairman of Irvine Co., everything about it is aimed at transforming 5,000 acres of strawberry fields into the region's reigning digital king. How? First, there's space. Orange County has more square footage of available commercial space than Silicon Valley, Irvine Co. says. At Irvine Spectrum, promoters tout everything from general access to high-speed data lines to the campus' landscaping. Another benefit is access to major transportation routes and easy access to both San Diego and Los Angeles. Within 15 minutes, employees can reach the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways, John Wayne Airport, and an Amtrak station located in the middle of the Spectrum itself. Also attractive is the synergy between the business world and UC Irvine, whose research staff garnered Nobel Prizes in chemistry and physics in 1995. So far, the formula works. The Spectrum's ever-growing campus now includes 2,200 companies, a large number of them technology start-ups. "There's no need for us to be parochial about this, or to say that we only want companies to come to Orange County. We want everyone in California to do well," said Richard Sim, executive vice president of Irvine Co., "But there's no denying that in Southern California, we are the biggest technology hub. Everything that a company could possibly want is here. What else is missing?" Silicon Valley's risk-oriented soul, say local executives. In its early days, Silicon Valley fed off a constant supply of engineers and executives alienated by the bureaucratic culture of big business -- people such as Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, who split from Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel. Orange County executives say the spirit of unconventionality and defiance is lacking here. There are no local cafes or corner bars where programmers meet and kvetch after work. And critics say it's tough to start a revolution from the relative comforts of suburbia. "People say we're the next Silicon Valley," said Don Allen, a spokesman for Wonderware, which is often cited as a Spectrum success story. "But it's obvious to me that we need more time to mature." Few of the computer technology companies based in the Spectrum are industry leaders. The center has no Intel or Microsoft, no single dominant player spinning out dozens of young millionaires eager to launch their own firms. Microsoft, AT&T and Apple each have a presence in the Spectrum, but only in the form of sales offices, not major research and development centers or dominant manufacturing hubs. So what is here? A solid, comfortable foundation primed for growth, say industry watchers.=20 On the PC front, there's Western Digital, a maker of hard disk drives, and consumer electronics behemoth Toshiba America Electronic Components. The digital buzz spills out to the surrounding area, with Rockwell International making Costa Mesa the home for its headquarters and Newport Beach the hub for its semiconductor business. It's the promise of a golden future that draws companies such as Laughlin-Wilt Group to the area. When the electronics manufacturing firm decided to open an office outside Oregon, employees called their travel agents and booked flights to all of the typical high-tech hubs, including Silicon Valley, North Carolina's Research Triangle and Boston's Route 128. Then they heard about Irvine Spectrum, where 27 percent of the technology companies fall into the biotechnology or biomedical firms. The advantage of moving to Orange County, said company founder Joe Laughlin, was simply the lack of competition and the availability of cheaper space. "Breaking into Silicon Valley right now is impossible," said Laughlin, whose company provides manufacturing and circuit-board assembly services to telecommunication and medical device makers. "Here we can slip into the scene." Copyright 1998, Los Angeles Times. The Tech Coast: San Diego: After cold war, biotech and wireless get hot By Elizabeth Douglass March 20, 1998 Navy ships, government contracts and the San Diego Zoo are still important staples in the local economy, but the region's hot industries have a different focus these days: AIDS drugs, wireless telephones and high-tech golf clubs. It's a big change for a region once so dominated by defense contracts that General Dynamics alone employed nearly a third of the private-sector work force. As the recession and the Cold War thaw hit the city in the early1990s, thousands of high-wage jobs disappeared and economists worried about San Diego's economic future. But the region has rebounded strongly with the help of powerful weapons -- the rich research base of UC San Diego and other institutions, the unique clout of the start-up support group Connect and the drawing power of fast-growing Qualcomm. "San Diego's really remade itself into a very exciting high-tech center," said Julie Meier Wright, president of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. "As recently as the early 1990s, this was a defense economy." The region's new economic strengths are not overlooked by venture capital firms. More than 90 San Diego-area companies took in $428.5million in venture funds last year, according to a tally by Coopers & Lybrand. The figure, which represents a 15 percent increase over 1996, ranks the region second in the state for venture deals, well ahead of Orange and Los Angeles counties. (The Bay Area remains the state's king of venture cash.) More than half the venture funding flowed to the region's huge biotechnology industry, which encompasses an estimated 250 companies. Many of them are tucked away in the city's Torrey Pines area, west of Interstate 5 and close to the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the research powerhouses of UCSD, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Scripps Research Institute. Connect, a group affiliated with UCSD, has had a role too. It sponsors venture capital conferences and provides entrepreneurs with links to potential partners, accountants and patent attorneys. Many tech leaders believe Connect's networking role has fostered the kind of cooperative business environment that ultimately helps companies grow. For many years, the biotech group's success rate was unimpressive. But within the last year, three locally developed drugs have earned regulatory approval, including the AIDS drug Viracept, which brought profits and skyrocketing sales to Agouron Pharmaceuticals. "There are dozens more (biotech products) in late-phase clinical trials, so the pipeline is rich in this area," said Wright. Wireless telecom, once largely fueled by defense contracts, has grown with blistering speed in San Diego. The region has become one of the nation's hot spots for the technology -- employment in that sector has quadrupled to about 25,000 in the span of five years. Much of the growth has been generated by the twin powers Sony Electronics and Qualcomm, which together added thousands of local jobs while ramping up production of digital wireless phones. Qualcomm, once criticized as a renegade upstart hawking a suspect technology, now has a work force of more than 10,000 -- it added 3,000in 1997 alone -- and its name on the local football arena, formerly Jack Murphy Stadium. Its technology, a method of transmitting wireless phone signals in digital form, is now widely accepted, and the company has become the driving force behind San Diego's emerging Wireless Valley. Copyright 1998, Los Angeles Times. The Arctos Group [Information Strategies for the Real Estate Industry] Post Office Box 329 - Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 02167-0003 USA tel: 617.342.7411 - fax: 617.232.0025 - email: arctos@arctos.com visit our WWW site at URL: http://www.arctos.com/arctos ------------------------------ From: Robert Gordon Reply-To: rlgordon@bellsouth.net Organization: Central Carolina Bank Subject: Re: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 21:04:29 GMT I don't know of any specific articles but Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, should be considered on of the top areas in the country. It is located between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill which gives it access to three major universities. It has major research and development centers for IBM, Nortel and Cisco. The {Raleigh News & Observer} did a major write-up in the March 15, 1998, Business section. Robert Gordon Network Services Central Carolina Bank ------------------------------ From: Victor Escobar Subject: Re: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 04:03:48 -0500 Organization: MindSpring Enterprises Blacksburg, VA is a very happening place. A partnership exists between VA Tech and the surrounding area which is bringing lots of stuff (fibre to the home, etc.) to bear. Plus, Blacksburg has the highest density of computers of anywhere in the world, supposedly. (And I qualify that with the `supposedly.') Just do a search on BEV (B'burg Electronic Village) with your favourite browser. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Mar 1998 06:54:14 -0800 From: Cortland Richmond Reply-To: ka5s@saber.net Subject: Re: Telecom and Technology Centric US Cities While it might not be precisely what you had in mind, the little town of Petaluma, 40 miles North of San Francisco, is home to a disproportionate share of the US telecom innovation, with DSC, Diamond Lane, AFC and others, all working on new digital solutions for future telecoms, and aggressively marketing their technologies for today's rapidly changing telecom structure. Strange, then, that in Petaluma I can't even get a reliable 28.8 connection! I work on stuff lots faster than what my local carrier can provide. Cheers, Cortland ------------------------------ From: skitch+@pitt.edu (Mitchell L Franzos) Subject: Re: 3000.00 Phone Bill HELP!!! Date: 22 Mar 1998 17:54:33 GMT Organization: University of Pittsburgh In article , Gail M. Hall wrote: > I have a suggestion for those national ISPs like ATT.NET and a general > complaint about figuring out local vs. long distance numbers. > When the national ISP has its list of phone numbers for new user > signup, instead of making people go through tons of phone numbers, > program the configuration software for calling the ISP to ask the > users where they live or to enter their telephone number. Then the > program should pop up the few phone numbers that are **local** to that > number or the **least costly** for that number. This would really > help people who don't really know which numbers are local and which > numbers are long distance. Or they can do something like what the WebTV box does ... AFAIK the first time you use a WebTV box, it dials a modem on an 800 number, and the computer on the other side gets the ANI and figures out what the best dialup number would be for you and sends that down to the WebTV box which then hangs up and dials the local number it just got. No user interaction at all, short (< 1 minute) connection on the 800 number ... pretty slick if you ask me. Mitch Franzos (412) 401-0968 skitch+@pitt.edu Skitch [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The only thing I see wrong with this is that with phone numbers and area codes changing so rapidly these days, the Web TV reference might also be wrong. At least with *some* user interaction, a reasonably intelligent user could make a distinction on the matter. Web TV should certainly suggest local numbers however. I think America OnLine does the same same on the first call. They locate several nearby numbers, but the user still has to make the final choice from the offerings presented. PAT] ------------------------------ From: wolf.paul@aut.alcatel.at@aut.alcatel.at (Wolf Paul) Subject: Re: GSM PCMCIA Card Lets You Stay On-line Date: 22 Mar 1998 11:10:51 GMT Organization: Alcatel Austria AG In article , Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond writes: > I've come across so many problems when taking a laptop and PCMCIA > modem around: different plug style, different dial-tone, problem > finding a decent telephone line, problem finding a place where to plug > the laptop in etc. > Often, I ended up connecting through my hotel room, thus paying some > extortionate telephone rates that hotels sometimes practise. > My way round this was to use, whenever possible, a modem connected to > a GSM phone, say around Europe. No more plug problems, no more trouble > finding a phone line. The GSM International roaming agreements did the > job. I have NEVER YET come across a hotel which charges rates anywhere as high as roaming agreement rates in Europe usually are. So from my perspective, this sounds like a high-priced convenience which may sometimes be justified, but I still prefer to find out what the phone sockets in a given country are like and using some kind of adapter or workaround to connect to landline phones. Just my two cents (or pennies, or centimes, or whatever) worth. W. N. Paul/KSRU * Alcatel Austria AG * Scheydgasse 41 * A-1210 Vienna, Austria wnp@aut.alcatel.at * +43-1-277-22 x5523 (voice)/x118 (fax) * +43-1-774-1947 (h) ------------------------------ From: jdearing@netaxs.com (John Dearing) Subject: Re: PacBell's Response to Posted Complaint Date: 22 Mar 1998 21:43:46 GMT Organization: Philadelphia's Complete Internet Provider Michael D. Maxfield (tweek@netcom.com) wrote: > Remember me? I posted here several days ago, and I was in a very > nasty mood over not being allowed to impress upon a 611 repair > representative, that a certain problem I was experiencing with my > phone service to certain destinations, was not with my lines, but with > PacBell's circuits. The question you had about the AMI vs B8ZS setting on the interoffice trunk facilities reminds me of a trouble report I was out on a couple of years ago when I was still an outside Special Services Tech. We had a customer who was a subscriber to one of the Bell Atlantic dialup services (pre bellatlantic.net days). Anyway, they were calling from one central office area downtown to the next office over (where the dialin modem pool was). He was still using a 2400 bps modem and was getting the periodic repeating "squigglies". Calls to other modems in other parts of the city were just fine. At that point I realized it was clearly an interoffice facility problem since the line had been tested several times by the regular repair techs and was A-OK. I managed to get in contact with someobne in the NOC (Network Operation Center) that was willing to admit that there *might* be a problem. The hardest problem an outside tech has is always convincing the Switchman that there is a problem inside. 8-) We started tracing a few test calls. They watched what trunks the calls went out over and noted what trunk group and channel. Wesoon found out that 3 entire trunk groups (24 trunks each) were not capable of passing data. They were fine for voice but couldn't pass data worth a s**t. It turns out that the problem was the trunks were optioned for B8ZS and should have been AMI. It seems that the muxes these trunks pass through take a bunch of individual trunk groups (24 channels, a T-1) and mux them onto a DS3. There is a card that controls 4 T-1's at a time. If that card is optioned for B8ZS then ALL FOUR T-1's are now B8ZS. It seems that these 3 trunk groups were initially turned up OK as AMI. One slot was "spare". A customer requests that a new B8ZS T-1 be installed. The central office goes and puts the new T-1 in that spare slot and reoptions the card for B8ZS, not realizing they just "broke" 3 other T's. They temporarily fixed it by busying out those three trunk groups. This forced the traffic onto other trunks that were OK. They then rearranged the trunks so that the AMI trunks were where they belonged and the B8ZS was where it belonged. John Dearing : Philadelphia Area Computer Society IBM SIG President Email : jdearing "at" netaxs "dot" com U.S.Snail : 46 Oxford Drive, Langhorne PA 19047 (USA) Voice Phone : +1.215.757.8803 (after 5pm Eastern) ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V18 #42 ***************************** NOTE: ISSUES 43 AND 44 APPEAR PRIOR TO ISSUE 42 IN THIS ARCHIVE DUE TO MAILING PROBLEMS.