TELECOM Digest     Thu, 7 Jul 2005 23:53:00 EDT    Volume 24 : Issue 313

Inside This Issue:                            Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Web Users Jam UK Sites For News About London Blasts (Lisa Minter)
    Digital Imaging Tech Widens News Gathering (Lisa Minter)
    Florida Boy on Cell Calls 9-1-1 Over 40 Times! (Nathan Strom)
    VoIP Card for Toshiba Strata CT (caveman)
    Looking for Panasonic KX-T4550 (TSLtrek)
    Florida Man Charged With Stealing Wi-Fi Signal (Lisa Minter)
    Broadband Use Jumps 34 Percent in USA According to FCC (Lisa Minter)
    Re: Non-Bell ESS? (Tony P.)
    Re: Bell Usage of IBM Computers For Switching (fgoodwin)
    Re: Last Laugh! Western Union's Comment About Useless Phones (J Haynes)

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

From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com>
Subject: Web Users Jam UK Sites For News About London Blasts
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 22:31:54 -0500


By Jeffrey Goldfarb

LONDON (Reuters) - Record numbers of visitors deluged British Web
sites on Thursday as people around the world sought news of the blasts
that rocked London's public transport.

Sites operated by public broadcaster BBC, satellite TV company BSkyB
(BSY.L), news provider Reuters (RTR.L) and the Financial Times
business newspaper (PSON.L) suffered longer delays on their home pages
Thursday morning in London because of the volume, according to a
company that monitors Web traffic.

"There was a significant amount of turbulence in terms of
performance," said Roopak Patel, an analyst at Keynote Systems.

The BBC expects by the end of Thursday it will have had the most
visitors in a single day in the history of its news Web site, though
it won't have official data until Friday.

"We have had a huge surge in people using the site today," BBC
spokeswoman Naomi Luland said. "We are pretty certain this is going to
be our busiest ever day."

The bbc.co.uk Web site experienced some delays, she added, but handled
the volume well.

"We haven't had any major problems. We've had consistency in
service. There may have been a little slowdown earlier," Luland said.

Among the other popular UK sites were sky.com/skynews, ft.com and
reuters.com.

By 3:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), Sky said it had registered 1.7 million unique
visitors for the day.

"That's the equivalent of a month's traffic on the site," Sky
spokeswoman Stella Tooth said.

"We had 25 million page impressions and the site was very robust and
withstood the extra traffic," she added.

The Reuters sites at reuters.com, reuters.co.uk and others in Europe
experienced a "technical fault" with their servers unrelated to high
volume earlier in the day, the company said. The problem was fixed by
the afternoon.

"In the morning, we saw five times the normal traffic for our global
network of sites and from this afternoon it was about twice the normal
traffic," spokeswoman Susan Allsopp said. "We saw huge traffic for the
tsunami in Asia so I don't think we can say it's a record, but it's
high peaks in our coverage."

A spokeswoman for the FT said it would not have any information about
the number of visitors to ft.com until Friday.

Keynote's index of some 40 UK business Web sites showed an increase in
delays, with the wait time for pages to load spiking to 17 seconds
during peak usage from the normal average of 2 seconds. Reliability
decreased as well as one in four attempts to load a Web page failed at
peak times, according to Keynote.

"Users who were trying to access the information were seeing higher
than normal delays, and at the same time some people weren't able to
get through to some sites," Patel said.

He added that U.S. news sites saw no major delays because Internet
infrastructure in the United States is more robust and most users were
on the Web hours after the attacks happened.

At MSNBC.com, which is co-owned by General Electric Co.'s NBC and
Microsoft Corp., a spokeswoman said data indicated that traffic to the
site was about twice normal levels on Thursday morning. She also said
the site was seeing twice the average number of streaming video
viewers.

The spokeswoman added that the site did not experience any technical
delays.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, airplane attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, many news Web sites were so overwhelmed with
visitors that they could not be accessed, forcing on-the-fly redesigns
to simplify homepages with fewer photographs and less
advertising. (Additional reporting by Nicole Volpe in New York)

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: Digital Imaging Tech Widens Newsgathering 
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 22:35:18 -0500


By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer 2 hours, 8 minutes ago

Among the more striking photos appearing online after Thursday's
coordinated London explosions was one of a double-decker bus, its
front intact but its sides and top ripped open. The image, on the
BBC's Web site, came not from a staff photographer but from an amateur
who happened on the scene with a digital camera.

With inexpensive cameras everywhere, including increasingly in cell
phones, we're seeing more searing images than ever of human drama. The
chances of getting poignant amateur video, meanwhile, are improving
radically.

Following Thursday's morning rush hour blasts on the bus and at three
subway stations, amateurs snapped shots before professional
journalists could get to the scene.

The BBC posted one reader-contributed image showing subway passengers
being led through tunnels and another of smoke filling another
photographer's subway car.

It also posted camera phone video including an 18-second clip of a
passenger evacuating the subway. The image was dark and jerky but gave
a sense of crisis.

"What you're doing is gathering material you never could have possibly
got unless your reporter happened by chance to be caught up in this,"
said Vicky Taylor, interactivity editor for BBC News' Web sites.

Many amateur photos are mundane yet gripping, said Steve Jones,
professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Visitors Thursday to the photo site Flickr, for instance, saw one sign
at one station that simply stated, "Tube network closed."

While journalists descend on the stations where the explosions took
place, an amateur might snap shots from "a train station that wasn't
bombed but that has a lot of security, and you sort of immediately
compare that to your own experience," said Jones.

Adam Tinworth, a London magazine editor and freelance writer, posted
several shots from his digital camera on the Internet. Among them:
images of blockaded streets and of professionals "trying to do the
same thing I was except with a much different camera."

"I was grabbing photos to give people a feel of what it's like to be
an ordinary person," Tinworth said.

Of course the use of amateur photographs by professional news
organizations is not new. The Associated Press and others routinely
buy rights to photos produced by eyewitnesses.

But digital cameras and phones make more such images possible, and the
Internet makes distribution easy. Many Web journal services and Flickr
let you post directly from a cell phone, while the BBC had a dedicated
e-mail address for such photos.

(The BBC and other British news sites did perform more slowly, though,
because of heavy traffic in the hours following the explosions,
according to monitoring by Keynote Systems Inc.)

Taylor said reader-submitted accounts from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
were mostly text while the BBC received several hundred photographs
Thursday and used about 70 on its Web site and TV.

She said amateurs submitted photos to the BBC for free, but then some
sold rights to other news organization.

Jones said the quality has improved since the Sept. 11 attacks. As
well, eyewitnesses in London were more selective in what they posted
online. The captions they wrote were more descriptive and
professional-sounding this time around.

Nonetheless, user-generated digital imagery does create new challenges
for news sites, which has to make sure a photo isn't already owned by
someone else and that it's wasn't digitally manipulated.

The BBC compared the bus image with shots its crews took from the
rear, matching landmarks in both pictures to make sure it wasn't
digitally doctored, Taylor said. For other pictures, BBC staffers
contacted the photographers for verification.

There's also the task of sifting through all the images.

A half-day after the explosions, Flickr had 150 photos marked
"explosions," 111 for "blasts" and 219 under "terrorism." More than
325 fell under "London Bomb Blasts."

Many were simply television screen grabs.

With "the ability for so many people to take so many photos, the real
challenge will be to find the most remarkable, the most interesting,
the most moving, the most striking," said Flickr co-founder Caterina
Fake, adding that engineers were working on software to help that.

It remains to be seen whether the best images were even on the
Internet yet.  Many of the best photos and video from the Asian
tsunami disaster came days or weeks later.


Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

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

From: Nathan Strom <nstrom@ananzi.co.za>
Subject: Florida Boy on Cell Calls 9-1-1 Over 40 Times!
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 22:33:26 -0400
Organization: Octanews


 From http://www.tampabays10.com/news/news.aspx?storyid=15846:

> Leesburg, Florida - Emergency officials say dispatchers were kept
> busy by a 5-year-old Leesburg boy on a cell phone.  But Lake County
> sheriff's officials say they couldn't trace the call and the boy
> wouldn't tell them where he lives or who his parents are.  Leesburg
> police say they do know the boy lives somewhere in the Leesburg
> area.  The 5-year-old also told them he liked ice cream and knew he
> wasn't supposed to play with a cell phone.  Officials say the boy
> called 9-1-1 more than 40 times yesterday afternoon.  Dispatchers
> urge parents to take out the batteries from disconnected cell
> phones.  The Associated Press

Guess they still need to work on that E-911 rollout.

Couldn't they check with the cell phone provider and see who the ESN
is/was last registered to?

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

From: caveman <caveman.k@gmail.com>
Subject: VoIP Card for Toshiba Strata CT
Date: 7 Jul 2005 20:01:22 -0700


Does any one know of any VoIP cards that can be used with a Toshiba
STrata CT system (the ones that are without the builtin VoIP) ?

Thanks.

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

From: TSLtrek <TSLtrek@gmail.com>
Subject: Looking for Panasonic KX-T4550
Date: 7 Jul 2005 12:12:47 -0700


Does anyone have a good working Panasonic KX-T4500 or 4550 cordless
phone with answering sytem that they want to sell or maybe trade for a
KX-TG5240?

I like the personalized greeting in each mailbox and the pager call
 ... both features do not exist in any cordless phone today.

Thanks,

-Terry

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

From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com>
Subject: Man Charged With Stealing Wi-Fi Signal
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 15:22:24 -0500


ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Police have arrested a man for using someone
else's wireless Internet network in one of the first criminal cases
involving this fairly common practice.

Benjamin Smith III, 41, faces a pretrial hearing this month following
his April arrest on charges of unauthorized access to a computer
network, a third-degree felony.

Police say Smith admitted using the Wi-Fi signal from the home of
Richard Dinon, who had noticed Smith sitting in an SUV outside Dinon's
house using a laptop computer.

The practice is so new that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement
doesn't even keep statistics, according to the St. Petersburg Times,
which reported Smith's arrest this week.

Innocuous use of other people's unsecured Wi-Fi networks is common,
though experts say that plenty of illegal use also goes undetected:
such as people sneaking on others' networks to traffic in child
pornography, steal credit card information and send death threats.

Security experts say people can prevent such access by turning on
encryption or requiring passwords, but few bother or are unsure how to
do so.

Wi-Fi, short for Wireless Fidelity, has enjoyed prolific growth since
2000.  Millions of households have set up wireless home networks that
give people like Dinon the ability to use the Web from their backyards
but also reach the house next door or down the street.

It's not clear why Smith was using Dinon's network. Prosecutors
declined to comment, and a working phone number could not be located
for Smith.


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.

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

From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com>
Subject: Broadband Use Jumps 34 Percent in USA According to FCC
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 15:23:45 -0500


The number of U.S. consumers and businesses that subscribe to
high-speed Internet service, or broadband, jumped 34 percent in 2004
to almost 38 million lines, according to new statistics released on
Thursday.

The United States lags 15 other countries in broadband coverage,
according to international statistics, but U.S. officials stressed
that some countries subsidize deployment and are more densely
populated in smaller areas.

Approximately 5.4 million subscribers were added during the second
half of 2004, according to a new Federal Communications Commission
report. The agency had previously reported adding 4.3 million
broadband lines in the first half of the year.

More consumers picked high-speed Internet from cable companies last
year than broadband from local telephone companies, known as digital
subscriber line service (DSL), according to the FCC report.

Cable companies added about 5 million customers during the year, a 30
percent increase to 21.4 million lines, while the number of DSL
subscribers climbed about 45 percent, or 4.3 million lines, to 13.8
million lines.

Cable and telephone companies are engaged in a fierce battle to offer
customers a suite of communications services. DSL is less expensive
than cable Internet service but offers slower download speeds.

Broadband is becoming more widely used as consumers want faster access
to the Internet for research, shopping, watching movies and
downloading music.  President Bush pledged during his 2004 re-election
bid to ensure there would be universal access to broadband by 2007.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has made eliminating regulatory hurdles to
achieve that goal his top priority since taking the reins of the
agency earlier this year.

"The dramatic growth in broadband services depicted in this report
proves that we are well on our way to accomplishing the president's
goal of universal, affordable access to broadband by 2007," Martin
said in an opinion piece published on Thursday in The Wall Street
Journal.

He said the FCC should ease some old regulations on telephone
companies to put them on the same footing as cable operators, but
added that the government would not relinquish its role of protecting
consumers and aiding law enforcement.

"This means that we must treat all such providers in the same manner 
 -- free of undue regulation that can stifle infrastructure
investment," he said.

But one consumer advocate criticized FCC policies as harming
competition for broadband.

"Competitive Internet service providers are now history; the U.S. has
a duopoly -- cable and telephone industry -- over broadband," said
Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital
Democracy. "Both cable and telephone have a long history of
anti-competitive behavior."


Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited.

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

From: Tony P. <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net>
Subject: Re: Non-Bell ESS?
Organization: ATCC
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 16:53:26 -0400


In article <telecom24.312.7@telecom-digest.org>, 
dmine45.NOSPAM@yahoo.com says:

>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I know from my personal experience that
>> Illinois Bell had ESS in the Wabash office in downtown Chicago in 
>> 1974, along with the Superior office on the near north side the same
>> year. But I think they were just the first editions or versions of
>> that type of switch. PAT]

> The Western Electric #1ESS was invented in 1965, with the upgrade
> #1AESS invented in 1976. These were analog switches with computer
> control (and in my opinion, glorified crossbar switches with reed
> relays).

> Others, as I've mentioned before, came out with their fully digital
> switches before Western Electric came out with their fully digital end
> office switch (the #5 ESS) in 1982.

Actually WE came out with #4 ESS in the mid 70's. Of course the 4 was
a toll class switch, but it was a truly electronic switch.

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

From: fgoodwin <fgoodwin@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Bell Usage of IBM Computers For Switching
Date: 7 Jul 2005 12:29:55 -0700


hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

> I do note that the Bell history said they intended for very long
> product lifespans, so anything they made had to be able to withstand
> many years of service.  I believe they didn't change this philosophy
> until the 1970s when rapidly changing electronics kept making
> components obsolete quickly.

I don't know if this is relevant to the statement you read, but
regulators controlled the rate at which AT&T and the local Bell Telcos
could depreciate their equipment.  Longer depreciable lives meant
lower expenses and reduced pressure to increase rates.

As might be expected, the carriers were always asking the regulators
for faster depreciation, and the regulators always pushed back with
longer lives.  It wasn't until the late 80s when local regulators
finally realized that an electronic or digital switch did not
realistically have a 30-year life.

Fred Goodwin

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

Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Western Union's Comment About Useless Phones
Reply-To: jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu
Organization: University of Arkansas Alumni
From: haynes@alumni.uark.edu (Jim Haynes)
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 23:07:27 GMT


> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No one, it seems, had their hands
> totally clean in the Bell divestiture. Far from being a 'visionary'
> be dismantled. We know for a fact that Harold had been approached by
> some friends in the Justice Department as a judge who would likely
> be sympathetic to their cause (the breakup of Bell) so apparently
> that ...

The government had been on Bell's case for a long time.  There is a book
published in 1941, "The Bell Telephone System" by Arthur W. Page, in
which he, a Bell insider, tells all the virtues of the telephone system
being a regulated monopoly rather than a competitive bunch of companies.
He complains a lot about the government back then having a grudge against
the Bell System.  There was a paper published in a legal journal after
the breakup titled "Is the Third Time the Charm?  A Comparison of the
Government's Major Antitrust Settlements with AT&T This Century"
(by Geoffrey M. Peters, Seton Hall Law Review, 1985, p. 252.)
This discusses the circa 1920 case, the case that ended in the 1956
consent decree, and the case that Judge Greene handled.  I believe the
first of these dealt with the Bell System trying to drive the independent
telcos out of business and acquire them.  


jhhaynes at earthlink dot net

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


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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #313
******************************