Telecom/1996-04-telecom-walnutcreek.iso/back.issues/telecom-recent/[e-mail] _Sat Jan 13 09:05:48 1996.msg

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Subject: TELECOM Digest V16 #15

TELECOM Digest     Sat, 13 Jan 96 09:05:00 EST    Volume 16 : Issue 15

Inside This Issue:                          Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Re: Fridays are Free With Sprint (Les Reeves)
    Re: Fridays are Free With Sprint (Tim Dziechowski)
    Call for Papers: IVTTA (Voice Technol for Telecommunications) (M. Spiegel)
    Blizzard of 96 - Phone Service in Northern Virginia (Scott Robohn)
    Re: TELECOM Digest V16 #12 (John M. Sullivan)
    Re: SDSL v. ADSL (Jon M. Taylor)
    Cellular "Customer Service" and Fraud (Greg Vaeth)

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From: [e-mail] (Les Reeves)
Subject: Re: Fridays are Free With Sprint
Date: 12 Jan 1996 10:14:02 -0800
Organization: CR Labs


Leonid A. Broukhis ([e-mail]) wrote:

>    Go to http://www.sprint.com/ then to the Business Sense
> International (which will bring you to
> http://www.sprintbiz.com/cgi-bin/qfridays.cgi ) and tell us _where_
> does it say anything about residence phones. If it sounds too good
> to be true, it isn't.

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: According to Les, it says nothing about
> residence phones, but does not specifically exclude them. He says that
> when he talked to their representative, he was told that 'any phone
> was eligible if it was used to make business calls'. I presume you
> have to refer to yourself as a business; is that so hard to do?  Are
> they going to demand that you produce evidence of business telephone
> service as per local telco records? Here in this area, lots of people
> work from home as a routine thing and do so with residence service from
> Ameritech.

Pat is correct.  I have received much mail from folks who have been
told by Sprint that the program is only available to business
customers.  The truth is that it is a limited time promotion offered
in conjunction with Sprint's Business Sense program.  Business Sense
is targeted at business customers, but not limited to them.  You
neither need a business line nor a business entity to get the program.
I grilled them at length about this point.  I have the Business Sense
program on two residential lines, and the customer is a person (me).

Sprint needs to get their ducks in a row about this.  Apparently they
have not yet explained the program correctly to all of their employees.

> I don't think you have to default any lines to them; you can do it by
> keeping your lines with whatever carrier they are on now (AT&T, smile)
> and just remembering to prepend 10333 to your dialing string all day
> on Friday.

I don't believe this is true.  They definitely send an order to your
LEC to change your primary carrier to 10333. And if you were to change
it later on to some other carrier, Sprint would be notified by the LEC
of the change.  I can't predict what Sprint would do in this
situation, but some other carriers I have dealt with immediately
cancel whatever plan you were on when you try this.  And keep in mind
that the Free Fridays offer is only available through the end of
February, so you could be unable to get back on this insane plan if
you tried to change your primary IXC in the last couple of weeks of
February.

You *can* use 10333 to make Free Friday intra-lata, intra-state calls
if Sprint currently offers this in your lata.  I also grilled them on
this specific issue, and they assured me that this was the case.  This
seems rather odd to me since I am pretty sure Sprint excludes these
calls on their residential "Sprint Sense" program.  But this whole
thing seems like Sprint is going to take a tremendous financial bath,
so what the heck.

Here in Atlanta it costs as much to make a 70 mile intra-lata call on
BellSouth as it does to call Kansas, so I will be making a few
intra-lata calls on Friday.

One last caution about this program.  Before you start making your
four-hour calls to Gaum on Friday, be sure that your account with
Sprint is Business Sense, and that your free Fridays are enabled.  I
called them today (Friday), and inquired as to the status of my
account.  I was told that I was indeed on Business Sense, but my free
Fridays did not start until *next* Friday.  Had I not made that call,
this could have been a very expensive Friday.


Les     [e-mail]       Atlanta,GA      404.874.7806
404.875.1273  ISDN Voice      404.875.1274  ISDN Data/Fax


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They may be telling people it is
necessary to be a business customer, but I wonder how they would
be in any position to define what a 'business customer' is?  I would
say even if it is necessary to default a line over to them that is
not a bad tradeoff. Give them one of your lines you don't use very
often -- except on Friday of course! I guess to avoid the aggravation
of arguing with them over whether or not residence phones can be
included it is better to just mention that you work from home and
operate your business there. Les, do you know if there is any
minimum length of time one has to be on the program? In other words
do you have to stay on for a full year in order to get all the
Fridays credited back to you for example?  Can you stay on for a
month, get four Fridays of free calls and then drop out?    PAT]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Tim Dziechowski)
Subject: Re: Fridays are Free With Sprint
Organization: PictureTel Corp.
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 1996 01:23:50 GMT


In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Leonid
A. Broukhis) says:

> Go to http://www.sprint.com/ then to the Business Sense
> International (which will bring you to
> http://www.sprintbiz.com/cgi-bin/qfridays.cgi ) and tell us _where_
> does it say anything about residence phones. If it sounds too good
> to be true, it isn't.

Yesterday I called Sprint's business 800 line and switched my SOHO
home business line to Sprint.  The salesman asked me if I wanted to
switch my residence line too, so I did.  It gets better: I only have
to pony up $50/month for _both_ lines.

So starting next Friday I'll be netsurfing until midnight on one line
while my wife calls all her relatives in Colombia, SA.  Unless of course,
she notices the "conference" button on my AT&T 2-line 9132...  ;-(


[e-mail]  (Tim Dziechowski)


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Another person wrote to me asking
'what are you trying to do, cause Sprint to go bankrupt?'. Believe
me, it would take a lot of people signing up for Free Fridays to
make that happen, but it will be fun to see them sit and re-think
this crazy promotion after it has been running for awhile. As Les
points out, after signing up, be certain to check the next Friday
to make sure you are installed on 'Business Sense' before you
start making a pig of yourself. In his case, it took until the
second Friday after enrollment before Free Fridays started. Don't
get caught unaware!  PAT]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Murray F Spiegel)
Subject: Call for Papers: IVTTA (Voice Technol for Telecommunications)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 21:04:51 GMT
Organization: Speech Technology Research Group (Bellcore)
Reply-To: [e-mail]


                           CALL FOR PAPERS

                        THIRD IEEE WORKSHOP ON
                     INTERACTIVE VOICE TECHNOLOGY
                  FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS APPLICATIONS

                   September 30 - October 1, 1996
                     The AT&T Learning Center
                         300 N Maple Ave
                    Basking Ridge, NJ 07920 USA
             Sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society

The conference venue is on 35 semi-rural acres and is close enough (1
hour) for side trips to New York City. Our workshop will be held
immediately before ICSLP '96 in Philadelphia, PA, approximately 80
miles from our location.

The IVTTA workshop brings together application researchers planning to
conduct or who have recently conducted field trials of new
applications of speech recognition, speaker indentity verification,
text-to-speech synthesis over the telephone network.  The workshop
will explore promising opportunities for applications and attempt to
identify areas where further research is needed.

Topic areas of interest:
- ASR/verification systems for the cellular environment
- User interface / human factors of applying speech to telecommunications tasks
- Language modeling and dialog design for "audio-only" communication
- Experimental interactive systems for telecommunication applications
- Experience in deployment & assessment of deployed ASR/verification systems
- Text-to-speech applications in the network
- Speech enhancement for telecommunications applications
- Telephone services for the disabled
- Architectures for speech-based services


Prospective authors should submit 1-page abstracts of no more than 400
words for review.  Submissions should include a title, authors' names,
affiliations, address, telephone and fax numbers and email address if
any.  Please indicate the topic area of interest closest to your
submission.  Camera-ready full papers (maximum of 6 pages) will be
published in the proceedings distributed at the workshop.  Due to
workshop facility constraints, attendance will be limited with
priority given to authors with accepted contributions.

          For further information about the workshop, please contact:

Dr. Murray Spiegel, Bellcore, 445 South Street, Morristown, NJ 07960 USA
Phone: [phone];  Fax: [phone];  E-mail: [e-mail]

          For full information, visit our web page:
http://superbook.bellcore.com/IVTTA.html

          Send abstracts (fax or email preferred) to:

Dr. David Roe
IEEE IVTTA '96
AT&T Bell Laboratories
Murray Hill, NJ 07974 USA
Phone: [phone];  Fax: [phone]
E-mail: [e-mail]

                            SCHEDULE

Abstracts due (400 words, maximum 1 page):          Mar 15, 1996
Notification of acceptance:                         May 1,  1996
Submission of photo-ready paper (maximum 6 pages):  Jun 15, 1996
Advance registration to be received before:         Jun 15, 1996
Late registration cut-off:                          Aug 30, 1996
IVTTA '96 Evening welcoming reception:              Sep 29, 1996
IVTTA '96 Conference:                          Sep 30 & Oct 1, 1996


                           WEB PAGE
Check our web page for late breaking news and developments:
         http://superbook.bellcore.com/IVTTA.html

                      REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Early registration (prior to June 15, 1996):
Day-only: $390
Full:  $650

Late registration (Jun 15 -  Aug 30, 1996):
Day-only:  $465
Full:  $725
IEEE members: charges are $25 less
Additional proceedings:  $25

Day-only registration includes all technical sessions, welcoming
reception, lunches, snacks, banquet, and a copy of the proceedings.
Full registration includes all of the above plus: dinner on evening of
arrival, breakfast both days, two nights lodging at the conference
center, and use of the center facilities (jogging track, exercise
center, pool, etc).


                        WORKSHOP COMMITTEE

GENERAL CHAIR                         REGISTRATION & FINANCE
Candace Kamm                          Dick Rosinski
AT&T Bell Laboratories                AT&T Bell Laboratories
[e-mail]                  [e-mail]

PROGRAM CHAIRS                        PUBLICITY
David Roe                             Murray Spiegel
AT&T Bell Laboratories                Bellcore
[e-mail]                     [e-mail]

George Vysotsky                       LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS
NYNEX Science & Technology            David Pepper
[e-mail]                    Bellcore
                                      [e-mail]
INTERNATIONAL STEERING COMMITTEE
Sadaoki Furui, NTT                    PROCEEDINGS
Matthew Lennig, BNR                   Jay Naik
David Roe, AT&T Bell Laboratories     NYNEX Science & Technology
Christel Sorin, CNET                  [e-mail]
George Vysotsky, NYNEX

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 12 Jan 96 11:53:12 EST
From: Scott Robohn <[e-mail]>
Subject: Blizzard of 96 - Phone Service in Northern Virginia


As we continue to have more snow dumped on us here in Northern
Virginia (Bailey's Crossroad's), I saw Pat's request to keep him
updated on how the weather is affecting phone and other network
service.  So here goes.

We've been getting fast busy signals intermittenly all week,
especially to the south and southwest parts of Fairfax County.  At one
point on Tuesday, I'd been trying to call my wife ('S') with no
success (fast busy).  My colleague lives a mile or two away from the
office and we had no problem calling his wife ('D') at home.  D kept
_gently_ reminding me that it was snowing more and more and that if I
got stuck at the office tonight, S would be all alone with the kids.
So, D called S on their cell phone and called me on her cordless phone
and held two handsets together!  Wasn't perfect, but it worked.  Way
to go, Cellular One.  And no, I didn't get stuck that night.

Internet access has been a problem, too.  Web access and file
downloads have been _real_ slow.  We have a T1 from this building to a
local provider; hardly anyone has been here this week, so I figure it
must be everyone snowed in playing with their new Christmas present
PCs.

Drive safely.


Scott Robohn
[e-mail]


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A federal government employee remarked
to me that, 'the first scheduled day back to work since the middle of
December a month ago, and then it gets cancelled as well from the snow
emergency ...' He was at work Thursday, may or may not have made it
in Friday, and of course Monday is a legal national holiday, although
the federal employee I was speaking with said a lot of his co-workers
and himself had been told they could go into work on Monday if they
wanted even though the offices would not be open to the public. Quite
a few federal people apparently will go in on Monday just to try and
organize the mountains of past due work waiting them and prepare
themselves for an incredible Tuesday when most will be overwhelmed
with members of the public waiting in line for service, etc.   PAT]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 12:21:46 -0500
From: [e-mail] (John M. Sullivan)
Subject: Re: Snow, Snow, Go Away!


Our Esteemed Moderator wrote:

<a detailed reminiscence of the 1967 Chicago blizzard>

> That was our 'storm of the century' now 29 years ago. Lots of stories
> came out of it (people stuck on CTA busses in high drifts for several
> hours; one woman giving birth on a CTA bus because it was impossible
> to get out of the bus and get to a hospital), and I imagine a lot of
> stories will be heard about the east coast blizzard in the years to
> come.

Oh yeah, we're getting all of those, and it isn't over yet.

Most of the above ground portion of the metro system was shut down for
a couple days.  This was after one train slid into another in the yard
a couple of miles from where I live early in the storm and killed the
operator.  That night around midnight a train on what I gather must
have been the last scheduled run got stuck on the tracks with about
200 people on board.  They sent a rescue train out to offload the
passengers but that got stuck too.

They were only about 3000 feet from the next station and some people
apparently wanted to walk out, but the crew wouldn't open the doors
because they were afraid of people stumbling around snow covered
tracks in the dark and getting electrocuted.  They ended up being
stuck there in the cold and the dark until the Metro authority managed
to get a locomotive up to pull them back to the last clear station at
around 6:30 the next morning.  After that they didn't send any trains
above ground at all for a couple days, which effectively cut off the
suburbs.

We also had a miraculous birth story (seems you can't have a serious
storm without one of those).  Woman went into labor in Arlington late
at night so her husband packed her into the car and tried to make the
hospital.  The car got stuck in a snowbank, still quite a long way
from the hospital, and they started walking through heavy snow in the
middle of the night, stopping every few minutes for her contractions.
They finally got picked up by a father and son in a pickup truck who
actually work at George Washington University hospital and were trying
to get in.  So they got her to the hospital in time for the delivery
and were the heroes of the moment.

The whole city was pretty much shut down.  Maryland and Virginia were
doing a reasonable job of keeping the main arteries as clear as
possible -- which frankly wasn't all that clear -- but of course DC
has no money, and a lot of the city streets were impassable.  The
National Guard lent the police dept. 14 Hummers with drivers to get
officers around to emergencies, and they even had three armored
personnel carriers busting through snow at one point.  The mail didn't
get delivered for a couple days.  Garbage pickups still haven't
resumed.  Several roofs collapsed.  They had to evacuate a nursing
home to a nearby hotel when the dining room roof buckled.  Fortunately
there were no serious power outages.

By Wednesday I managed to get into the office (my newsletter was
supposed to have gone out on Tuesday -- first time its been late in
the two years I've been writing it).  They had a couple lanes clear on
the interstates, but the merging lanes on the ramps didn't exist
anymore.  There was just a single plowed channel that dropped you
straight into traffic, so cars were lined up WAY back as the driver of
the lead car would cautiously inch around the edge of the huge
snowbank until he could see (praying all the while that he wouldn't
get clipped by something first), and then dart out when it was clear.
Most people stayed home Wed. however, so it wasn't bad other than
that.

Thursday totally sucked.  Everyone decided they could no longer
justify staying home, and the Federal government re-opened since
they'd all been home forever and were chomping at the bit.  The roads
were indeed passable, but could only handle a fraction of their normal
capacity because they mostly had at least one lane still under snow
and another that would disappear from time to time as the bank edged
out and forced cars over into the next lane.  The normal 15 minute
drive to work took me an hour and a half and that was by avoiding the
interstate entirely and taking back roads.  The beltway was a parking
lot.  One of my managing editors took 5 hours to get in, 2 of which
were spent covering two miles on the Dulles Toll Road.  Frankly I
preferred the snow.  (And I got my wish too!)

And here's the telecom angle.  We never had any trouble with the
wireline network, but Thursday when half of Washington spent half the
day parked out on the beltway the cellular networks were totally
jammed.  The aforementioned managing editor couldn't get a call
through from the toll road (in Virginia) to our office on the Maryland
side at all.  He finally managed to get a call through to his house in
Virginia and had his wife call the office via Bell Atlantic to tell
them where he was.  The evening rush was just as bad.

I should point out for the "PCS has a rocky road" crowd that I never
had any trouble with my Sprint Spectrum phone though.  Used it couple
of times during the day and the only time I had a problem was when I
was trying to call a cellphone on Bell Atlantic Mobile.  First time
the network just said the hell with it, try again later.  The second
time it rang the phone but only gave me about three rings before it
dropped me with an announcement that the party I was trying to call
was not available.  I don't follow cellular that much -- is that
standard or will it usually let the phone ring until you give up?

So anyway now it's Friday and snowing again.  Everybody stayed home
and the roads are terrible.  Part of the beltway is closed because no
less than 4 semis are jacknifed in a short stretch known locally as
the Rock Creek rollercoaster.  All the local airports are closed, a
plane slid off the runway at Dulles, but nobody was hurt.  It's
disaster land all over again!  We're only supposed to get another 4-10
inches or so this time, though (See, we've already gotten blase), and
I expect we'll be back to normal by Monday.


john sullivan    [e-mail]


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, don't forget Monday is a federal
holiday (Martin Luther King Day) and federal agencies will be closed.
That will affect some of the 'normalacy' on Monday. I am told some
agencies are asking workers who want to come in on Monday to do so
to try and organize themselves without a massive crunch from the
public. Then what happens on Tuesday? Will it snow again, or will
the money run out again?  <grin> ... PAT]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Jon M. Taylor)
Subject: Re: SDSL v. ADSL
Date: 12 Jan 1996 00:42:38 GMT
Organization: California State University, Sacramento


In article <[e-mail]>, Peter Brace <peterb@
melbpc.org.au> wrote:

> Is there really much commercial difference between SDSL and ADSL?

    AFAIK, ADSL is (as the name implies) asymmetric -- you get
much more downstream bandwidth to you than you can send back.  It was
thought up a couple of years ago when the "interactive TV" thing was
all the rage and everyone thought that the future of the information
superhighway was 500 home-shopping channels for couch potatos.

    Now that the extremely rapid growth of the Internet has placed
it in the forefront of the datacomm revolution, though, it has become
apparent that both downstream and upstream bandwidth are needed in a
more equitable balance, and thus we have SDSL.  I, too, read the web
page where it was claimed that T1/E1 speeds were going to be possible
over standard unmodified telco copper wiring with SDSL, but I have yet
to hear a detailed explanation of how this is possible without
repeaters.

> And is SDSL likely to have much of an impact on cable rollout? (i.e. is
> coax/fibre no longer needed??

    Well, if they can pull off what they claim with SDSL, it would
at the very least put off the inevitable task of upgrading the entire
worldwide copper phone plant to coax/fiber (and eventually all to
fiber).  However, even then the laws of physics dictate that you will
never be able to cram as much bandwith into a piece of copper wire as
you will a glass fiber.

    Photons are bosons, a class of subatomic particles which can
occupy the same space at the same time, and thus can pass though each
other without interference (unlike electrons, which are mesons).  This
means that there is essentially *NO* (theoretical) upper limit on the
bandwidth of a glass fiber, because you can send light down the pipe
at a huge number of different frequencies and they will not interfere
with each other.

    As long as the equipment at the ends of the fiber can pick out
the different frequencies from each other, you have no problems.  This
is the current bottleneck in fiber-optic networking technologies,
because the equipment at the ends of the fiber has to be electronics,
which can only switch so fast with current technology.  I think that
the current upper speed limit is around 10 GBPS, but that may be out
of date.


Jon Taylor = <[e-mail]> | <http://gaia.ecs.csus.edu/~taylorj>

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Greg Vaeth at General Instrument)
Subject: Cellular "Cust. Service" and Fraud
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 17:22:41 GMT


Hi,

I wanted to relate a few experiences I had recently with my cellular
carrier:

Week 1: I received a call from customer service confirming receipt of
their PIN number mailing and asking if I was ready to activate my PIN.
I said, "Wait a minute, your industry has a major theft-of-service
problem so you want me to make calling more inconvenient to protect
you from revenue loss?"  "Oh, no sir," she replied, " This feature is
to protect you!"  Right, I declined.

Week 2 (the day after I returned from Orlando, where I had about 40
minutes of airtime): My wife called me at work to say that she got
"number not in service" when she dialed my cellular number.  When I
called customer service, I was told that my phone had been cloned and
the number taken out of service.  I was incredulous, thinking I was
being punished for declining PIN activation.  However, after they told
me that someone in Florida cloned my phone, I explained that I made
the calls and they reactivated my number.  I asked why they had not
called me directly, they said that it was not their policy (some other
department flags the account, they just take the calls) , but that if
I had tried to use the phone the call would have been redirected to
customer service!!  "So I lose incoming calls and potentially am
delayed making an important/emergency call because you "think" I was
cloned?"  "Sorry, sir, that's our policy."

Week 3: I received another call from customer service, this time
confirming receipt of their "local security area" service where you
have to let them know you're going out of the area so that your phone
will work.  "Is it optional?", I asked "No sir".  I asked to speak to
his manager.  "Is it optional?", I asked his manager.  "Yes it is."  I
declined.  He would give no explanation of why the first guy said it
was not optional.

Sheesh! I know that fraud eventually costs me in higher rates, but
couldn't they be a little more up front about what they're doing?  And
why is it such a pain in the neck for me when they decide someone else
has cloned my phone?  Any comments?


Regards,


Greg


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Any comments? Yes ... for starters,
tell your existing carrier they are in violation of their contract
with you for causing those interupptions in your service and imposing
those special conditions on you after the fact. Close your account
with them and go to one of the other carriers such as Frontier, where
there are no contracts required and just month by month billing at
a less expensive rate.  PAT

------------------------------

End of TELECOM Digest V16 #15
*****************************