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The Telecom Digest for May 2, 2015
Volume 34 : Issue 80 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: Verizon caught upselling customers higher data rates with promises of "smoother" NetFlix (David Clayton)
Is it legal to sell some area code 408 numbers? (gg)
Re: Is it legal to sell some area code 408 numbers? (John Levine)
Re: Los Angeles Streetlights to Be Controlled via Cellular Network (Gordon Burditt)

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Date: Fri, 01 May 2015 14:36:50 +1000 From: David Clayton <dc33box-usenet2@NOSPAM.yahoo.com.au> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Verizon caught upselling customers higher data rates with promises of "smoother" NetFlix Message-ID: <pan.2015.05.01.04.36.47.537203@NOSPAM.yahoo.com.au> On Thu, 30 Apr 2015 23:47:01 -0400, Bill Horne wrote: > Verizon caught upselling customer to excessive Internet plans for > "smoother" Netflix > > by Chris Leo Palermino ........ > While most consumers would take Verizon's word at face value, > Rayburn knew that upgrading his service simply couldn't change his > Netflix speed. The average Netflix streaming speed on Verizon's FiOS > service tops out at 3.5 Mbps, a clip better than all other major > ISPs according to Netflix's own Speed Index tables, but a far cry > below 50 (or 75) Mbps. After Rayburn explained this to Verizon sales > reps, they argued that more bandwidth is needed given the demands of > multiple users in a household. In Australia a major telco is currently running TV ads exhorting their customers to upgrade their modems associated with one of their subscription services to devices with better Wi-Fi specs to "improve" the streaming experience! Since the bandwidth bottleneck will be the incoming WAN connection changing the internal Wi-Fi from 300 to 600mbps won't make one iota of difference, but most people won't realise that and some will get sucked in to upgrading unnecessarily. -- Regards, David. David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.
Date: Fri, 1 May 2015 08:49:43 -0700 (PDT) From: gg@ziiz.co To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Is it legal to sell some area code 408 numbers? Message-ID: <f562725b-af6b-459c-b7ef-2e795c20fb2d@googlegroups.com> I have a few phone numbers in area code 408 (San Jose, California, area) that I'd like to advertise for sale, with an eye to persuading small businesses to buy them because they're good business phone numbers (they end in 000). An FCC rule -- 47 CFR 52.107 -- bans the selling of toll-free numbers but doesn't address the selling of non-toll-free numbers. See: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/CFR-2012-title47-vol3/CFR-2012-title47-vol3-sec52-107 I haven't been able to find a federal law or regulation that would ban the selling of non-toll-free numbers. I've come up empty so far on the California PUC's website and by calling them. Same with the FCC. There's plenty of online speculation about the legality of selling non-toll-free numbers, but I've yet to find any online content that cites relevant laws or regulations. Can any of you direct me to a federal or California law (or regulation) that would ban my sale of some area code 408 numbers?
Date: 2 May 2015 03:11:07 -0000 From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Is it legal to sell some area code 408 numbers? Message-ID: <20150502031107.27162.qmail@ary.lan> In article <f562725b-af6b-459c-b7ef-2e795c20fb2d@googlegroups.com> you write: >I have a few phone numbers in area code 408 (San Jose, California, area) >that I'd like to advertise for sale, with an eye to persuading small businesses >to buy them because they're good business phone numbers (they end in 000). I think you will find that the problem isn't whether they're legal, it's whether telcos will let you transfer them. But I suppose that now that all numbers are portable, if you sold them to someone who ported them to a random CLEC, it'd work.
Date: Fri, 01 May 2015 19:21:49 -0500 From: gordonb.gqfiv@burditt.org (Gordon Burditt) To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Los Angeles Streetlights to Be Controlled via Cellular Network Message-ID: <AtGdnVuCuaMAhdnInZ2dnUU7-WmdnZ2d@posted.internetamerica> > If I had to guess, I'd say that you're both right: a GPS transponder > and logic would allow any streetlight within the bounds of a specified > area to respond to an "all on" command for that area. I'm not so sure that a command to a rectangular area would be the right thing to do in even most cases. Let's suppose that they need to turn the lights on full blast over a 5-mile stretch of I-20 in the evening because (a) they have to land a CareFlite helicopter there to pick up an accident victim, and want everyone to see backed-up traffic, (b) the highway is closed to demolish and/or install a bridge over it, and they want people to see the signs directing them to exits, or (c) this part of the highway is flooded. I think all of these have happened several times on parts of I-20 in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in the last 10 years. It's also problematic that a rectangular area with one most-significant-bit flipped could shut off half of the city, or country. You shouldn't have to update all the lamps should the route of a small section of I-20 change to know the new route of I-20. Only a few of those lamps will move. Highways tend to curve around a lot, and sometimes the difference between a light on a highway and a light on an access road are distinguishable only by altitude (My TomTom GPS makes similar mistakes regarding traffic cameras at intersections of access roads and warns me about them on the highway itself). Also, some lights on the same pole (and very close together, perhaps too close to distinguish with GPS) are aimed in different directions and shine on different roads. How easy is it to do a "cellular broadcast" to a bunch of lamps in an area, without having to make individual calls to each lamp, and without including any non-lamps? Can this be made to cost less than one cellular minute per lamp? How do you prevent telemarketers (or terrorists) from making (possibly collect) calls to the lamps and changing their state? You can solve some of this by putting smarts in the lamp database, not the lamps themselves. For example, you define an area called "I-20" subdivided by mile markers which resolves to dozens or hundreds of small rectangles, another one for the convention center which often needs lights on when special events get out. I presume that there are multiple laptops for workers to use, and that under normal circumstances they are returned to the office to get re-sync'd overnight, or they get live updates for the entire city. Moving lamps might set off an alarm for suspected lamp theft or the pole getting hit by traffic (or blown over by a tornado) so the lamp is lying in the middle of the road. > And, it would also simplify and speed up maintenance: work crews are > prone to manage records badly, so having a stock of "one size fits > all" lights in a truck, which can be put in place and automatically > tracked, would speed up road crew work and assure more accurate > recordkeeping. I still think individual identification of each lamp, by something other than GPS location, is needed. You need to be able to separately control lamps which GPS thinks are at the same location.

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