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TELECOM Digest Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:25:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 260 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson New Services Link Mobile Users to Online Magazines (Lisa Minter) Verisign to Manage .net Web Registry 6 More Years (Lisa Minter) California Forest Cameras Snoop on Wildlife (Lisa Minter) Fancy Math Takes on je ne sais Quoi (Lisa Minter) 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? (jg@earthlink.net) Re: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? (John McHarry) Re: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? (Joseph) Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig (GlowingBlueMist) Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig (Tony P.) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (P Romfh) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (Justin) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (Tim) Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones Using Phone Card! (Van Hefner) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (jon@earthlink.net) Re: SBC New Low Price (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage (johnspilker) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: New Services Link Mobile Users to Online Magazines Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 22:08:10 -0500 Two companies are combining online-only glossy magazines with mobile short message texting services to link mobile handset users to Internet publications even when they are not online. The companies -- Norwegian publisher Fast Forward Media Group and Belgian technology company Allisblue -- presented their new ways of connecting consumers to publications on Thursday at a conference of European publishers. Many of the publishers are struggling to find ways to earn money on the Internet, which is luring away readers of their print publications. With the new combination, consumers on the go will be able to send keywords to a short telephone number from their handsets, after which they will be sent emails with links to magazines they have requested, the two companies said. The animated magazines, which can be leafed through like real magazines, feature links to music, film and other multimedia content, which is sponsored by advertisers or which can be bought and paid for from the mobile phone account. Fast Forward Media said it would start the service with free online magazines such as PlayMusicMagazine.com. It expected to add more keywords, enabling consumers to compile tailored magazines and messages. Allisblue provides patented SMS-to-email technology, which allows consumers to send text messages instantly after picking up keywords from friends, billboards or on the radio and then find links to magazines in their email inboxes when they log on. "Almost everyone has a mobile phone, and 70 percent have email addresses, but outside the office, 18 to 35 years olds are only online for an average 35 minutes a day. The rest of the time they're in the real world, carrying a mobile. This connects them to the online world," said Allisblue Chief Executive Eric Delfosse. He said he was talking to three venture capitalist firms about additional funds to boost expansion of this service. Allisblue is starting in Belgium on short dial 3699 and will bring the service to other European countries. Telecoms operators can also expect to get a cut from the premium SMS services. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: Verisign to Manage .net Web Registry 6 More Years Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 22:09:33 -0500 By Spencer Swartz VeriSign Inc., the top manager of Internet domain names that allow people to find and surf Web sites, will keep control of Internet addresses that end in .net for six more years, the group that oversees Internet address allocation said on Thursday. The decision was expected after VeriSign in March got a tentative nod for the continued operation of the .net registry, which has provided VeriSign with about $20 million annually in revenue. VeriSign beat four other applicants for the registry, said the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the private-public Internet oversight group. VeriSign's current agreement for .net was scheduled to expire on June 30. Under VeriSign's new contract, which takes effect in July, the company will charge $4.25 annually for a new .net registry from $6 previously. The .net registry is a relatively small part of total Internet domain registrations, accounting for 7 percent of all domain name registration. The .com registry accounts for 47 percent of all domain name registrations, according to the company. VeriSign retains the rights to the .com registry until 2007 when it will have to renew that contract, which provides the company with about $200 million annually in revenue. Analysts have generally believed that losing the .net registry would have been more of a "headline" risk than a big revenue or profit problem to VeriSign. VeriSign took over the .net registry in 2000 after it bought Network Solutions, which had been running the domain. VeriSign, through a spokesman, said it was pleased with ICANN's decision and would continue to make investments in operating Internet domains. In April, the company said it will add high-powered computer servers that deliver up Web pages to users' browsers over the next two years to meet increased Internet use in emerging markets such as Brazil, India and eastern and central Europe. VeriSign, which posted about $1.2 billion in revenues in 2004, is also a top provider of ringtones, and processes millions of e-commerce transactions every day for thousands of businesses who effectively outsource their online payment systems to VeriSign. VeriSign's stock on Thursday closed up 2 cents at $30.82 on Nasdaq. The stock's 52-week high is $36.09. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would hope that as ICANN sets up these new registrar contracts they would be insisting on certain conditions to protect the integrity of the net. Probably they are not, however. Just allow things to go like status-quo at present which is considered 'good enough'. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: California Forest Cameras Snoop on Wildlife Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 10:30:51 -0500 A 30-acre patch of forest near Idyllwild has been outfitted with robotic cameras and other high-tech gadgets that spy on wildlife, trees and even roots as part of a pioneering effort by scientists to take nature's pulse. Scientists sitting hundreds of miles away can remotely operate mostly wireless devices, including a camera that swings on cables through the trees, to watch bluebird eggs hatch, measure the growth of ferns and study the impact of air pollution. Devices in the outdoor laboratory allow nonintrusive, around-the-clock monitoring. "This is definitely going to change the way we do science," Michael Allen, director of University of California, Riverside's Center for Conservation Biology, told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. "This is going to fill in the gaps of our knowledge," said Michael Hamilton, director of the James San Jacinto Mountain Reserve where the high-tech devices have been installed. "You want to know when those hot moments occur," he said. "Is the forest going to disappear in the next 50 years if the temperature changes by three degrees? Now we have a window into those variables." The information obtained could one day save lives and Earth itself, Hamilton said. The technology could eventually uncover ways to combat global warming, track the deadly mosquito-borne West Nile virus, detect water pollution before people drink it and predict the course of invasive plants that alter landscapes and choke off water sources. "The technology has profound implications," said Deborah Estrin, director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles. The James Reserve is a partner of the center, which was established in 2002 when it won $40 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. Of that, $4 million went to the reserve, Hamilton said. Sensors scattered throughout the reserve record temperature, humidity, wind, rain, lightning and even how cool air sweeps in at night. "It's a subtle but important change ecologically," Hamilton said, explaining that the cool air can trigger seedlings to sprout. Scientists at UC Riverside and UCLA can analyze the computerized data. "That's kind of the downside -- we'll be spending too much time staring at computer screens," Allen said. On The Net: http://www.jamesreserve.net Information from: The Press-Enterprise, http://www.pe.com Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 12:08:14 -0400 From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: Fancy Math Takes on je ne sais quoi Click here to read this story online: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0602/p13s02-stct.html Byline: Gregory M. Lamb Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor (MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.)English rules the Internet, which can be a frustrating thing for the world's 1.3 billion Chinese and 322 million Spanish-speakers. They outnumber Anglophones. Even online, two-thirds of users speak something other than English at home. So when someone promises a smoother and easier translation program, people around the world tend to perk up their ears. It's a step closer to a truly "worldwide" Web where every page would be available for everyone to read in his or her own language. The latest step comes later this month when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an arm of the United States government, announces results of its tests of several machine- translation systems. The agency is expected to give top honors, not to the linguistic-savvy programs at universities and elsewhere, but to a newcomer: Internet search company Google. Google's apparent success suggests that a new approach to translation -- fancy math rather than linguistic know-how -- may be the way forward in a field that has struggled with the nuance and ambiguity of human language. "Nobody in my team is able to read Chinese characters," says Franz Och, who heads Google's machine-translation (MT) effort. Yet, they are producing ever more accurate translations into and out of Chinese -- and several other languages as well. To demonstrate the software's prowess, Mr. Och displayed an Arabic newspaper headline at a recent media tour of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. One commercially available MT program translated it: "Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden." Then he displayed the translation from Google's prototype, which made considerably more sense: "The White House Confirmed the Existence of a New Bin Laden tape." Of course, every MT program can point to strengths in its approach versus weakness in others', experts say. The key is whether statistical systems have become powerful enough to outperform the intensive, rules-based systems now available. "These translations were impossible a few years ago," Och says. But the advent of ever-cheaper and faster data-crunching and the mushrooming number of online documents have changed the equation. Google has improved the algorithms for its MT program, he says, by feeding its computers the equivalent of 1 million books of text, using sources such as parallel translations of United Nations documents. Google's MT system is still under development and not available to the public. Talking about it at an event for journalists and industry analysts may mean that at least a test version will be coming in the next few months, observers speculate. "The results were very impressive, not the stupid machine translation you see on the Internet, which isn't really good," says Philipp Lenssen, who's been writing about Google in his online blog, Google Blogoscoped, since May 2003. "This opens up a lot of new possibilities because you don't really want to read machine translation at the moment," Mr. Lenssen says. He speculates that it could be a perfect part of a Google Web browser, should the company decide to release one. A user might search the entire Web in his native language and have pages returned to him already translated. "You can apply it to so many situations," he says. Many translations, one root ... Today, nearly every translation service offered on the Web -- AOL, Alta Vista, Babblefish, even Google's -- is powered by translation technology developed by Systran. The company, based in San Diego and Paris, has been involved in MT for more than 30 years. Each day, it translates more than 25 million Web pages. MT involves years of hard work creating rules for translation between a pair of languages, says Dimitris Sabatakakis, chief executive officer of Systran. Using statistical methods, such as Google does, is a well-known technique. "There is no technology breakthrough," he says. "Everybody does the same." Machine translations, he says, work best if the original text is written with care to make it easily translatable, avoiding problematic or ambiguous words and phrases. More and more websites, especially those interested in e-commerce, are trying to create text that is easily translated, Mr. Sabatakakis says. Though machine translations are often less than perfect, he says, they're still useful to gain a quick idea of what a website is all about. Today, Systran offers translations between 40 language pairs, and in the next 12 months it will add 40 more, he says. Each of the two approaches to MT -- hand-tailoring rules for translation between pairs of languages or using statistical analysis to detect patterns -- has its strengths and weaknesses, says Robert Frederking, who teaches at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Rules-based systems are time-consuming to develop and expensive, but great for specialized tasks, such as translating a manual on bulldozers, which might have a number of specific and unique terms. "Systran has put literally hundreds of person years over a 30-year period into building each language pair that they translate," Dr. Frederking says. Statistical systems have yet to prove that they can produce superior translations, says Frederking, who hasn't seen the results of the most recent NIST evaluations. But doing well at NIST means more than showing off a few specific examples of better translations to reporters, he says. Even evaluating the quality of translations is difficult and expensive, Frederking says. Since 2002 NIST has used a computer program called Bleu to do its evaluations. It works "reasonably well," he says. Unofficially good ... The results of the NIST evaluation won't be released until later this month. "Google did do _very_ well," says Mark Przybocki, the machine-translation project coordinator at NIST, without confirming Google's score. Some 20 research groups asked to be evaluated, each trying new techniques not yet in commercial use. Each group was given 100 news items to translate from Arabic and Chinese into English. Both rules-based and statistical MT systems can stumble badly on such generalized reading. One problem is the vast and changing vocabulary. One analysis of The Wall Street Journal, Frederking says, found that 1 or 2 percent of each edition consists of words that have never before appeared in the paper. A statistical principle called Zipf's Law holds that with so many words available, nearly every article will have some uncommon words, he says. Unless statistical MT programs have seen these words in many previous contexts, they can mistranslate them. Proper nouns are a special challenge. Crooner Julio Iglesias, for example, shouldn't be translated as July Churches, the literal English translation of his Spanish name. An MT system should be able to spot which words are names and not translate them, he says. But even that doesn't help, if the translation is from Japanese or Chinese characters. "You have to translate them into some kind of Latin letters," he says. Frederking predicts that eventually rules-based and statistical methods will merge, with some knowledge of grammar and syntax being added to the statistical approach, making for translation programs that are both broad and deep. Meanwhile, Google's announcement that it's working on a better MT system creates interest in the field "and that's a good thing" says Sabatakakis of Systran. But "we know that there are no magic solutions. You don't learn a language with statistical methods." Countries with the most Internet users (in millions): 1. United States: 185.6 2. China: 99.8 3. Japan: 78.1 4. Germany: 41.9 5. India: 37.0 6. Britain: 33.1 7. South Korea: 31.7 8. Italy: 25.5 9. France: 25.5 10. Brazil: 22.3 Source: CIA World Factbook Copyright 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor -- an independent daily newspaper providing context and clarity on national and international news, peoples and cultures, and social trends. Online at http://www.csmonitor.com Click here to order a free sample copy of the print edition of the Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/sample_issue.html Sign up to have the Monitor's headlines sent directly to your inbox. http://www.csmonitor.com/email (or view http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra.nytimes.html and review the far right hand column.) NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Quite a few years ago, prior to my illness, I had several Digest web pages available in various languages, and I am thinking about starting that again. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jg@earthlink.net Subject: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 06:13:12 -0500 Hi, I believe my 'voice line' is being tapped [the line feeds through the 'opponents' switchboard]. How difficult is it for them to 'decode' my modem [to ISP] traffic ? I'm guessing/hoping that my modem has to 'synchronise' with the ISP's in analog mode, so it's difficult for a '3rd' party to listen ? Is this right ? Thanks for any info. == John Grant. ------------------------------ From: John McHarry <jmcharry@comcast.net> Subject: Re: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:03:28 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Thu, 09 Jun 2005 09:04:22 -0400, TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Barry Margolin: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Another reasonable plan is Alltel, > which I do not think has any expiry time on its prepaid minutes, > although it is bit more expensive per call. PAT] I have that. It is something like $.35/min. incoming and outgoing. There is a nasty monthly charge if you don't use it at all for a month, but nothing if you use even one minute. Since I use it for alarms from a public radio station transmitter site, it is almost perfect. The only catch is that there is no roaming. The local area is quite large, so that is not often a problem. ------------------------------ From: Joseph <JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:50:09 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Thu, 09 Jun 2005 09:04:22 -0400, Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote: > I have a cellphone, but I use it very infrequently -- maybe about 5 > minutes a month. I bought a Virgin Mobile prepaid cellphone, but they > require that I purchase $20 of time every 90 days to keep it active. > So I have to spend nearly $7/mo when I use at most $2/mo. > Is there a cellphone plan closer to my needs? A company that resells AT&T Wireless/Cingular TDMA IS-136 service "Beyond Wireless" will activate any qualifying phone free with the requirement that you make a call at least every 60 days. Theoretically with their service you could have phone service for months on end and not pay anything unless you used up all your minutes. The drawback (you knew there had to be one) is that they only have local numbers in a limited number of locations so if the number wasn't local to people calling you they would pay a toll charge to call you. Outgoing calls cost 15 cents/minute down to 10 cents/minute if you purchase a large number of minutes refill voucher. I have two former AT&T Wireless TDMA phones that I've activated on their service to use if the need arises. I should also add that calls that are not "on network" are charged at four times the regular rate so if you are in an area where AT&T Wireless never had service it would not be a good fit for you as any minutes you would use would be off network and would cost you four times the regular amount. If however you are in an AT&T network area it's a good deal especially for the casual caller. Theoretically you could go to a resale/thrift shop and get a used AT&T wireless handset and have Beyond activate it for you and you'd have an extremely economical package. http://gobeyond2.chainreactionweb.com/catalog/airtime_rates.php And there's a trick to ordering minutes from them if you're not in one of the areas they serve. Set up an account using one of the states that they do serve and use your credit card billing address minus the state (use one of the states served.) Otherwise you won't be able to set up an account to buy minutes. ------------------------------ From: GlowingBlueMist <nobody@invalid.com> Subject: Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:12:18 -0500 Organization: SunSITE.dk - Supporting Open source HarryHydro <harryhydro@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:telecom24.259.5@telecom-digest.org: > Hi Folks: > I wrote a qbasic program that scans 4 Alcatel radios. It also > pages me on problems. I was called almost 10 times around 1:30AM this > morning (6/9/05) and again around 4:00AM even more times! My heel are > draggin'. Anyway, this has been going on for the last few days. > These are not stormy evenings, or even windy. In the plots this > program makes, I see signals dropping, or maybe it's noise level > increasing, enough to break microwave paths. This is 6gig stuff ... The > 4 radios at this site point in different directions, and the radios > almost go wacky the same time, but not exactly. For a half hour, the > signal on one radio faded to almost break while the others were doing > OK. Sometimes the two receivers on one radio will fade together, > sometimes not. (diversity) I've associated some of these to mag > storms, but most are weather related. However, these last few days > have been pretty stable. > Could it be temperature inversions at 1:30 in the morning doing this? > Harry nI don't know about your location but when I was monitoring microwave sites for the military in Germany, most of the temperature inversion problems we ran into was in the early morning. The hills would cool off but the valleys would hold the heat unless a breeze was blowing. As you have already identified, the fact that your diversity beams tend to drop out at slightly different times helps to point to a temperature inversion problem if weather was ruled out. We did tend to have one other problem with fighter aircraft using our towers as practice targets. Either the bulk of the aircraft themselves or the aircraft electronic systems would drop the link as they came in for the final run. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net> Subject: Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig Organization: ATCC Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:11:40 -0400 In article <telecom24.259.5@telecom-digest.org>, harryhydro@hotmail.com says: > Hi Folks: > I wrote a qbasic program that scans 4 Alcatel radios. It also > pages me on problems. I was called almost 10 times around 1:30AM this > morning (6/9/05) and again around 4:00AM even more times! My heel are > draggin'. Anyway, this has been going on for the last few days. > These are not stormy evenings, or even windy. In the plots this > program makes, I see signals dropping, or maybe it's noise level > increasing, enough to break microwave paths. This is 6gig stuff ... The > 4 radios at this site point in different directions, and the radios > almost go wacky the same time, but not exactly. For a half hour, the > signal on one radio faded to almost break while the others were doing > OK. Sometimes the two receivers on one radio will fade together, > sometimes not. (diversity) I've associated some of these to mag > storms, but most are weather related. However, these last few days > have been pretty stable. > Could it be temperature inversions at 1:30 in the morning doing this? It is possible. 6GHz is millimeter radio, and water vapor does a number on that. ------------------------------ From: Pete Romfh <promfhTAKE@OUThal-pc.org.invalid> Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:53:40 -0500 Organization: Not Organized Monty Solomon wrote: > Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to > Verizon Wireless Phones When New Messages Arrive > Home and Business Customers in N.Y.C. and New England Can > Receive TXT Alerts on Their Verizon Wireless Phones > NEW YORK, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon home and > business voice mailboxes now can alert customers on their > Verizon Wireless phone that someone has left a message. > Starting today, Verizon voice-messaging customers in New > York City and New England can add a feature that sends a > text message to any Verizon Wireless short text messaging- > capable phone with an alert that a new voice message has > been left on the customer's landline phone. > http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49739949 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What is supposed to make > that so exceptional? Cingular Wireless has always had an > icon on the display screen indicating voice message > waiting, and I have always had my phone set to make three > chirps when that icon is turned on. PAT] The "New" feature is having the voicemail on your home phone send a message to your cellphone saying a message has been left. Most voicemail systems have had this feature for years. You could have it call your cellphone or a pager. The SMS message is sort of a new wrinkle on an existing service. Pete Romfh, Telecom Geek & Amateur Gourmet. promfh at hal dash pc dot org ------------------------------ From: Justin Time <a_user2000@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Date: 10 Jun 2005 05:31:34 -0700 Hey -- anything to drive the number of minutes of usage up. (OBTW Pat, they are not talking about voicemail left on the cell phone, but on your landline.) ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:41:13 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications I find forwarding our home phone to my cell phone when we are on a trip works better. Monty Solomon wrote: > Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon > Wireless Phones When New Messages Arrive > Home and Business Customers in N.Y.C. and New England Can Receive TXT > Alerts on Their Verizon Wireless Phones [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That's how I do it also, even though I don't go on many car trips. Prairie Stream (local telco) has my landline set to 'forward on busy/no answer' to my Cingular cell phone. And since we here get unlimited local area calling, my landline 620-331 phone forwards after 3 rings to my cellular 620-330 number. My regular callers know they are getting forwarded to my cell phone when after 3 audible rings (in their ear) they hear a couple seconds of silence as the call is 'pulled away' from the landline and transferred to my cell phone. When I am truly not available, then the Cingular cell phone voice mail takes the call. PAT] ------------------------------ Reply-To: <postmaster@thedigest.com> From: William Van Hefner <postmaster@thedigest.com> Subject: Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 23:27:05 -0700 Organization: Vantek Communications, Inc. hizark21@yahoo.com wrote about: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! on: 8 Jun 2005 17:52:19 -0700 > MCI now charging extra payphones when using their phone card!!! > MCI has started charging a 65 cent surcharge on calls using their = phone cards ... Most companies have been adding payphone surcharges to their calling cards for a long, long time. This is absolutely nothing new. I have some MCI pre-paid calling cards that I bought at Costco last Christmas, and they plainly state that all calls made from payphones will be hit with a 10 minute/unit surcharge. At the rate I bought the cards at, that is a 29 cent surcharge. It's simple to understand why carriers are charging this fee. First of all, carriers have been forced to pay surcharges to payphone providers (via their carrier, OSP or reseller) on each call for years now. The compensation rate for these charges was raised more than six months ago to an all-time high. When you add the existing charges to the fact that carriers like MCI have to cut individual checks to hundreds of different carriers and resellers each month, you are talking about a major accounting nightmare. In some cases, MCI itself may be the payphone carrier, and it then has to cut a check to a division of its own company, which in turn has to send checks to literally thousands of independent payphone owners all over the country. If the payphone uses an MCI reseller or OSP, you have to add yet another middleman. You can blame our own Federal Communications Commission for caving-in to payphone owners and others involved in the industry for raising the limit on these surcharges. I guess that they feel sorry for the payphone companies, who have probably seen their revenues drop by 90% in the past 10 years. William Van Hefner Editor - TheDigest.Com http://www.thedigest.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But I have to wonder what was wrong with the old 'Separations and Settlements' process AT&T used for about ninety years. And by the way, we had a response on this yesterday as well, where the writer claimed that the 'fee to write checks' also cut into the profit telco made on calls using calling cards, etc. Actually, even without a master 'Separations and Settlements' process like AT&T used to administer, the telcos all have their own proceedures for this, and for the benefit of our writer yesterday, each time someone makes a call from a payphone, the carrier does not sit down and write a check for 65 cents or whatever. They go for about a year at a time, then they subtract what one owes the other from what the second one owes the first one and settle up the difference. In other words, John Q. Payphone Owner has a thousand dollars due him from MCI, and he owes MCI nine hundred fifty dollars. MCI offsets what they owe each other, and send John Q. Payphone Owner the difference, if any, or a bill if he owes them. Now John Q. may have been collecting the aggragate differences each month from the local telco -- let's call them Verizon for example (via the same technique) so when MCI makes an annual or semi-annual settlement with Verizon one of them says "do not forget about John Q and what he has coming"; they compare notes and give John his few dollars due. There is _not_ all that massive numbers of checks written and 'major expenses which cuts down on the profits' as our correspondent yesterday claimed. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jon@earthlink.net Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:56:13 -0500 Joseph wrote: >>> That's interesting. Both Verizon and Sprint have disabled SMS >>> completely when I requested it. Why can't T-Mobile? >> Maybe it has to do with the way GSM works. You didn't mention AT&T >> Wireless or Cingular. SMS is part of the GSM spec. I don't know if >> that's the case with CDMA. Isaiah Beard wrote: > It is, but can be inhibited if need be. I have to say, SMS seems to > be GSM's achilles' heel. A lot of signalling functions on GSM appear > to be handled by thinly vieled SMS messages, stuff that would be > handled on a more formal level in CDMA through the paging channel. Are there on-line specs for GSM and/or CDMA ? > I'm willing to bet that T-Mobile is unwilling to fully disable SMS on > an account because in many markets, they still use it for voicemail > and other notifications. Do they send the voicemail 'digitally compressed' [eg. simulated] ? What is the average bits/sec which they need ? Thanks for any info. Chris Glur ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: SBC New Low Price Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:47:07 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: As I read the original thread here, I > was of the impression it was not the wire pair(s) in question, it > was getting dial tone on that pair which telco would not supply > because of a billing dispute with a previous tenant. Telco could care > less about the wire pair; run as many of them as you wish, but then > get telco to interconnect. Was I wrong on this assumption? PAT] Perhaps the thread was bifurcated, but I didn't see the discussion about a billing dispute. The message I responded to was the debate about whether dial tone is required for a rental unit, as opposed to a good pair that is capable of working. And, to what extent the landlord is responsible. As to a billing dispute, in California, all the landlord would have to do is certify to the LEC that the deadbeat tenant has moved out. If the LEC refused to provide service to the new tenant at that point the California PUC could resolve that in short order. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The part of the thread we got here from AES discussed how the original tenant skipped owing money, and that although the landlord (apparently, I do not recall reading it) did in fact tell telco he had _new_ tenants, telco did not accept that as the complete story _in the proper context_ and said they wanted their money. And, if telco's version was correct, then the PUC would back them up. PAT] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz <strap@hanh-ct.org> Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 11:22:29 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Pat wrote: > So I, John Q. Spammer go to an ISP and ask for a connection. I tell > ISP I want to be known as 'spam.com'. I do not tell the ISP I want > to be known as '208.31.42.98' Um, Pat -- that's not correct. The ISP has absolutely nothing to do with your domain name. You don't tell him what you want to be known as at all in most cases. Usually they just assign you an IP address. If you have your own AS number and assigned block and are going to run BGP, you tell them what your IP is. But in either case, no domain names are involved. The only time the ISP might nbeed to know that info is if in addition to being your ISP they are also providing additional value added services, above and beyond just being an ISP, such as DNS hosting or SMTP mail. > ... ISP says I will take care of all that once you get installed by > a registrar. The registrar is the only business that needs to know about your domain name. Our ISP does not know/need to know/care what our domain name is. > Quite a difference, the registrar _is_ like directory assistance, > but different in the sense that directory assistance does not > _assign_ anything, but simply reports on what has been assigned. So > if the registrar was not a greedy son-of-a-bitch and started saying > NO! that would help a lot. Oh yes, I know that John Q. Spammer > could try to cut a deal under the table direct with the ISP, or > whomever it is that physically makes his connections in and out, but > ISPs working in concert with registrars could do a lot to clean up > the mess. Given that in most cases involving spammers, the ISP has no way of knowing what registered domains are using a block of addresses, that won't work. > And like the old system which was used with FIDO, when a site > becomes a nuisance, he gets delisted, and if others up the line do > not cooperate then _they_ get delisted also. The rule ISP's and > registrars would use is that if John Q. Spammer was expelled by > whoever, then no one touches him or works with him. PAT] There is such a system in place more or less. The ROKSO list run by spamhaus is pretty much what you describe. It's of limited use, however. The spammers use prepaid debit cards under phoney names to register domains, so they can't be identified before hand by the registrar. Most spammers these days don't even really have an internet connection for their business per se -- they hire a sleazy overseas company to host their server for them. They use fake names again to do this. The spam is sent as follows -- somone gets a consumer level dsl, dial up, or cable internet account. They then use this ISP connection to get trojan infected PC's worldwide to send the spam for them. Since no spam comes form their own account, it never gets traced to that account. The only identifiable things are the domain name of the server, the registrar of the domain name, and the company hosting the server. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Seems like an awfully convoluted way of running your business, IMO. So my response would be to kill the domain name of the server, chop off the registrar's head, and burn down the company hosting the server. Fair enough? As one writer here yesterday pointed out, the ISPs could cure a huge amount of the problem (but I would say give the registrars some part of the job also) if they gave a Good God Damn, which many of them do not, such as MCI. And don't forget, MCI uses their employee Vint Cerf as their front man/mouthpiece with ICANN, truly God's Gift to Netters everywhere. And the small business people who run local ISP operations who _do_ care and _do_ attempt to check out new customers are treated like imbiciles, the same as your Esteemed Moderator. PAT] ------------------------------ From: johnspilker@msn.com Subject: Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage Date: 10 Jun 2005 09:20:22 -0700 They are charging us a monthly fee that amounts to $8 a month with taxes. I did send a registered letter to AT&T legal department and got a simple form letter that told me to contact Qwest. What an insult. I've contacted Qwest for confirmation that the account was closed on April 20. I'm not sure what to do next. I suppose I could file a complaint with the FCC but I wouldn't expect any quick results. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Forget for a minute that the FCC does not care one way or the other about insults you have endured. AT&T claims that Qwest is their agent, so send another registered letter to Qwest (a copy of your original letter to AT&T) with a cover note saying "remove my AT&T service immediatly". 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