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TELECOM Digest     Thu, 14 Jul 2005 14:50:00 EDT    Volume 24 : Issue 322

Inside This Issue:                             Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Sprint, Nextel Merger Approved by Shareholders (USTelecom DailyLead)    
    For Surfers, a Roving Hot Spot That Shares (Monty Solomon)
    Enterprise Numbers Still in Use? (Lisa Hancock)
    Re: Non-Bell ESS? (Fred Goldstein)
    Re: Non-Bell ESS? (Thor Lancelot Simon)
    Re: A Question About International Country Code Numbers (John Levine)
    Re: A Question About International Country Code Numbers (A Burkitt-Gray)
    Re: Well,Duh Re: Mixing Blogging With Work Can Lead to Unemploy (Sobol)
    Re: New Microsoft Patches Already Getting Exploited (Barry Margolin)
    Re: Don't Let ID Fraud Happen to You (Alan Burkitt-Gray)
    Correction on Bernie Ebbers Sent to Prison (Henry)

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Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 13:25:17 EDT
From: USTelecom dailyLead <ustelecom@dailylead.com>
Subject: Sprint, Nextel Merger Approved by Shareholders


USTelecom dailyLead
July 14, 2005
http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=23077&l=2017006

		TODAY'S HEADLINES
	
NEWS OF THE DAY
* Sprint, Nextel merger approved by shareholders
BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH
* XM buys WCS Wireless to expand offerings
* Broadband price war unfolds among cable, phone companies
* Alcatel, Shanghai Media strengthen ties
USTELECOM SPOTLIGHT 
* Just Released: The USTelecom IP Video Implementation & Planning Guide
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
* Pannaway planning BAS access platform update
REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE
* Editorial: Brand X ruling boosts telecom sector
* Mobile phone disposal program under discussion

Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others.
http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=23077&l=2017006

Legal and Privacy information at
http://www.dailylead.com/about/privacy_legal.jsp

SmartBrief, Inc.
1100 H ST NW, Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20005

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

Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 08:47:04 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: For Surfers, a Roving Hot Spot That Shares


By JOHANNA JAINCHILL

When the Sunningdale Country Club in Scarsdale, N.Y., opened its gates
last week to a location shoot for "The Sopranos," a new fixture was on
display in the mobile dressing rooms - a roving Wi-Fi hot spot.

With a device called the Junxion Box, the production company can set
up a mobile multiuser Internet connection anywhere it gets cellphone
service. The box, about the size of a shoebox cover, uses a cellular
modem card from a wireless phone carrier to create a Wi-Fi hot spot
that lets dozens of people connect to the Internet.

The staff members of "The Sopranos," squeezed into two trailer
dressing rooms, needed only the Junxion Box and their laptops to
exchange messages and documents with the production offices at
Silvercup Studios in Queens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/14/technology/circuits/14share.html?ex=1278993600&en=56a56edcee958205&ei=5090

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

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
Subject: Enterprise Numbers Still in Use?
Date: 14 Jul 2005 07:27:07 -0700


Someone on the railroad newsgroup said Enterprise numbers are still in
use.  (Enterprise numbers were manually reached through the operator
and served as toll-free lines prior to 800 direct dialed service.  The
operator had a table in which she converted the Enterprise number to
an actual telephone number and placed the call, billing the
recipient.)

I don't think he's correct.

He said:

> They are still in use, yes. Their purpose is different from 800
> numbers, as it gave the called party the ability to restrict
> incoming calls to selected areas of his choosing, areas as small as
> a single exchange.  That's never been available with 800 numbers.

[public replies please]


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: He is wrong, but so are you. 'Enterprise'
numbers (they were called 'Zenith' in many places; 'Enterprise' was 
the Bell System word; I think 'Zenith' was the word used by GTE and
some others) are now pretty much grandfathered to existing subscribers
(basically long time customers since the 1970's?) who wanted to keep
them. I do not think you can order new Enterprise/Zenith service, but
it is there for people who always had it and wanted to keep it. But
if you give it up, (or move, or otherwise change your service) that's
it. Don't ask for it back.  

And he is wrong in saying they were 'different'. They were the same
thing, regards restrictions on calling areas, etc. In the earliest
days of '800 service', out of the 600-plus possible 'prefixes'
possible in any area code (using the exclusion of '0' or '1' as the
first digit rule) those three digit code prefixes were assigned to
every type of restriction possible: Bands one through six for each
state; band eight (intrastate) for your state only' your community
only, etc. Band one was always the states immediatly adjacent to
your state, _but not including your own (intrastate) calls_; band two
was the next 'ring' of states beyond the band one area; the bands
got a bit larger as they expanded outward. Essentially the types of
'In-WATS' service were the same as the outward WATS bands. Hawaii 
and Alaska were not included in WATS; they were coin-rated calls. 
Sometime in the middle 1970's the band six areas (relative to
wherever you were located) were combined with band five points and
Alaska/Hawaii were made band six to everyone in the continental
USA. The three digit prefix in your 800 number said what was or
was not included, i.e. "the number you have dialed is not included
in your calling plan" was the intercept message given to people who
tried to dial 800-621-xxxx who were not in Illinois, for example,
since 800-621 was assigned to in-WATS subscribers in Illinois who
had requested Band 8 (Illinois intrastate only) service. 

On in-WATS (as opposed to out-WATS service) calls were always
translated to some 'regular' seven-digit number. For instance at
Amoco, in-WATS calls (I forget which band) were actually translated
into WELlington-5-1389 if memory serves me. Out-WATS on the other
hand went out and were billed to '146-0000' or something equally
non-dialable, i.e a 'dedicated line'; they had to be on separate
instruments or at least separate lines. Now today, in 2005, we
would say, like Shakespeare, "Much Ado About Nothing". The costs for
long distance calls have gone down to about nothing anyway, although
back then, if you bought long distance service in bulk, by the hour,
it was also less expensive than 'regular' service. But there became
a time at which it was just totally impractical to keep trying to
save money by the way you divided up pennies. 

You may _possibly_ be able to purchase 'banded' WATS service, either
in or out-bound from telco; I just have not kept up on it. I know 
most telecom companies do not supply banded service any longer (when
I was at Amoco in Chicago, quite literally if I had used a 'Band 1'
line and dialed 213-anything, the call would have gotten intercepted
with a 'not in your calling area' recording, just as people in
the 213 area who tried to dial 800-621 anything. Somewhere in our
archives there is a chart telling the description of each 800 prefix
as to what state it was in, and the limits or range of its incoming
calls.  I strongly suspect your railroad newsgroup person, unless he
was around prior to divestiture (hardly anyone is, these days) would
recall 'banded' WATS service. But obviously he remembers all about
Enterprise service, which _you_ don't. They were designed to do the
_same thing_, only with manual service instead of automated service;
that is, place an 'automatically accepted' collect call, no need for
an operator to get a verbal okay on accepting the charges. Lisa, would
you do me a favor please and post this in your railroad newsgroup
as a response for me?  Thanks. 

Oh, by the way, there was a Band Seven also, although rarely used. While
one through six were increasing larger geographic areas of the USA
(or in the case of Canadian WATS service in Canada) and band eight was
always intrastate _your state only_, band seven, as obscure as it was,
was _your community only_. If you only wanted to accept collect calls
automatically from the Chicago area and _you were in Chicago_ that was
treated as band seven. In Enterprise service days, Rate and Route 
(815+161 when the operator dialed it to inquire what to do) would 
advise 'in the Chicago exchange only, dial 312-xxx-xxxx'. And where the
operators had a 'flip chart' at their fingertips with the most common
Enterprise number translations, such as airlines, credit card
companies, etc, for more obscure or less well-known Enterprise numbers
the operator had to call Rate and Route (in Morris, Illinois 815+161)
to get advice.  Eventually, band seven was replaced in most places 
with special prefixes in a regular area code doing the same thing. 
In other words, anyone in Chicago 312 could dial (I think it was) 
312-920-xxxx to get the desired 'auto-collect' place they were
calling. In Kansas, until a couple years ago, 620-870 got you a 'free'
call to the Cingular Wireless switch here in Independence, then one
day Cingular Wireless told customers they would have to pay to stay
on that switch since 'we discontinued the special deal we had with
Southwestern Bell'.  Anyway Lisa, tell your newsgroup person about
this won't you please?   Thanks.   PAT]

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

Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 23:23:02 -0400
From: Fred Goldstein <SeeSigForEmail@wn6.wn.net>
Subject: Re: Non-Bell ESS?


On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 17:11:22 -0400, John Stahl <aljon@stny.rr.com> wrote,

>> ... The basic pattern was the same-an unexplained deluge of
>> electronic messages shutting down a computer built by DSC
>> Communications Corp. of Plano, Texas ...

DSC made Signal Transfer Points (STPs), which are the routers, packet
switches, in the Signaling System 7 network.  Their STPs may have had
a problem ... at one point over a decade ago, a bug in the code did
bring down some SS7 networks. I think that's what the allusion was to.

One of the SS7 network crashes happened when there was a bug in some C
code (this might have been AT&T/Lucent's? DSCs?) that exited a loop in
a manner that the programmer hadn't intended (the CPU not having a "do
what I mean" instruction!).  This was executed during congestion, and
would cause the link to fail over to its paired link (everything in
SS7 is paired), but that would now have congestion from queued
messages, so it would execute the flawed code, and the switch at the
other end of the line would get the burst of traffic, and if it had
that load of code, it would fail over....  nicely metastatic!

> To the best of my memory, DSC, whose name was mentioned in the archive
> you added (above), never made any type of an ESS switch, which the
> original essage questioned a non-Bell switch. DSC, now owned by
> Alcatel (France), made a whole line of CPE including multi-line
> systems and even some FO based equipment.

DSC made toll switches (Class 4), the DEX family, which was the
backbone of various LD networks including much of Worldcom.  Late in
the 1990s, they added some Class 5 features, mainly for CLECs, but
never really became competitive in that space.  They do get some use
for CLEC applications like ISDN PRI, used for dial-in modems, among
other things.

> So I'm pretty sure in relating again that the (only) non-Bell #5ESS
> switch back then was made by AGCS which was the creation of GTE and
> AT&T to get around the FCC regulations about Bell selling their
> equipment into the ILEC market. I do remember something about a couple
> of CO fires which were attributed to these switches but seem to recall
> there was some lightening connected with the stories.

AGCS was the old Automatic Electric, the company that first sold
Strowger switches in the 1890s.  It was owned by GTE for decades, and
built the GTD-5, a digital central office switch that long-time Digest
readers will recall was somewhat less stable than a 5E or DMS... at
least in some places.  GTE used a lot of them in house, though it was
becoming largely a Nortel shop.  By the mid-1990s, GTE was tired of
AE, so they sold a majority stake in it to AT&T (what became Lucent).
This was AGCS.  They stopped making GTD-5s, but had a few products of
their own (like Roameo and Superline), and eventually became a
marketing channel of Lucent, selling Lucent kit to the "independent"
ILECs.  This had nothing to do with the FCC though; it was just a
marketing decision.


Fred Goldstein    k1io  fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting       http://www.ionary.com/ 

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

From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon)
Subject: Re: Non-Bell ESS?
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 12:44:48 UTC
Organization: Public Access Networks Corp.
Reply-To: tls@rek.tjls.com


In article <telecom24.321.5@telecom-digest.org>, John Stahl
<aljon@stny.rr.com> wrote:

> hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote about Re: Non-Bell ESS? on Date: 12 Jul
> 2005  12:11:16 -0700:

>> I'm very sure it was a non Western Electric switch.  It was made in
>> Plano Tx (forgot the maker's name) and it was used for local calls....

>> ... The basic pattern was the same-an unexplained deluge of
>> electronic messages shutting down a computer built by DSC
>> Communications Corp. of Plano, Texas ...

> To the best of my memory, DSC, whose name was mentioned in the archive
> you added (above), never made any type of an ESS switch, which the
> original essage questioned a non-Bell switch. DSC, now owned by
> Alcatel (France), made a whole line of CPE including multi-line
> systems and even some FO based equipment.

DSC's main product for the carrier market was a signal transfer point
(STP): basically a router for SS7 signaling messages.  The other major
player in that market was Tekelec, who started to wipe the floor with
DSC just before DSC was bought by Alcatel.


Thor Lancelot Simon	                             tls@rek.tjls.com

"The inconsistency is startling, though admittedly, if consistency is
 to be abandoned or transcended, there is no problem."  - Noam Chomsky

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

Date: 14 Jul 2005 10:29:02 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
Subject: Re: A Question About International Country Code Number Assignments
Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA


> My question is about international phone-codes. I always wanted to
> know: why appointed regions have appointed phone-codes. I'm sure that
> it's sequence isn't accidental. What logic lies in this order of
> codes?

The codes are assigned by an office at the International
Telecommunications Union in Geneva.  They do indeed try to assign
codes with some geographic logic, such as 5x for the Americas, 3x and
4x for Europe, and 2x for Africa, but sometimes there aren't any
available codes in the appropriate regions. Hence Greenland is 299
even though it's not in Africa, because there weren't any 3xx codes or
4xx available when Greenland wanted a code.

ITU recommendation E.164 describes country code allocation, and
somewhere on the ITU site is the list of country codes as a free
download.

R's,

John

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

Reply-To: alan@burkitt-gray.com
From: Alan Burkitt-Gray <burkittgray@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: A Question About International Country Code Number Assignments
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 10:53:59 +0000


dawidov@yandex.ru asked about international phone codes:

Look at World Telephone Numbering Guide, wtng.info, or more specifically, 
for the history, http://www.wtng.info/wtng-hst.html

All you could ever want to know.

Alan Burkitt-Gray
Editor, Global Telecoms Business
www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com
aburkitt@euromoneyplc.com

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

From: Steve Sobol <sjsobol@JustThe.net>
Subject: Re: Well,Duh Re: Mixing Blogging With Work Can Lead to Unemployment
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 20:04:43 -0700
Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com


bummer@iecc.com wrote:

> I suppose it's all right to proclaim your sexuality, as long as you
> aren't criticizing the company!

I'm sorry, is there supposed to be something wrong with telling people
you're gay or bisexual?

I'm neither, but I find your comment pointless at best and rather
homophobic at worst.


JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED
Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the
temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638)

"Life's like an hourglass glued to the table"   --Anna Nalick, "Breathe"

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

From: Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>
Subject: Re: New Microsoft Patches Already Getting Exploited
Organization: Symantec
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 23:37:34 -0400


In article <telecom24.321.1@telecom-digest.org>, News Wire
<reuters@telecom-digest.org> wrote:

> Microsoft warns of software flaws in Word, Windows.

> Microsoft Corp. warned users on Tuesday of three new security flaws in
> its Windows and Word software and issued patches to fix the flaws,
> which could allow attackers to take over a computer system.

Who came up with the Subject line of the message?  The article says
that it's the *flaws* that are being exploited.  The Subject line says
that the *patches* are being exploited, implying that there are
problems with the patches.  That's the exact opposite of the claim --
the patches protect users from the exploits.


Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But people do not usually say 'the
flaws are being exploited', or maybe they do, as a form of verbal
shorthand. I think they usually say in this instance, 'the code
is being exploited because of the flaws in it.' Same difference
IMO, just phrasing it differently.   PAT]

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

From: Alan Burkitt-Gray, London SE3, UK <burkittgray@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Don't Let ID Fraud Happen to You.
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 10:53:59 +0000
Reply-To: Alan Burkitt-Gray <aburkitt@euromoneyplc.com>


Gary Novosielski <gpn@suespammers.org> noticed wireless terminals for
credit card authorisation in France.

These have been common in France for at least 10 years (though no one
was ever sure about the encryption): France pioneered PINs for credit
card authorisation in the mid 1990s (hence the domination of the smart
card industry by French companies), and introduced the wireless
terminals at the same time.

Wireless credit card terminals are now fairly common outside France,
in other parts of Europe -- in trains, for ticket payment, and in
restaurants.  Odd that they're not apparently in the US yet.

Alan Burkitt-Gray
Editor, Global Telecoms Business
www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com
aburkitt@euromoneyplc.com

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

From: Henry <henry999@eircom.net>
Sent: Thu, July 14, 2005 1:39 AM
Subject: Correction on Bernie Ebbers Sent to Prison


> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The British Broadcasting Company also
> had this same news on their wire this morning.  PAT]

A word to the wise...

'BBC' is the British Broadcasting _Corporation_.

Cheers,

Henry

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


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