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The Telecom Digest
Wednesday, January 25, 2023

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Copyright © 2023 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.
Volume 42 Table of Contents Issue 25
AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile quietly walk away from ZenKey joint venture
Verizon customers were unable to call 911 in Minneapolis, Brooklyn Center Monday morning
Re: Status of Copper Based Landline Telephones
Message-ID: <tqnkdo$3vpjb$2@dont-email.me> Date: 23 Jan 2023 22:48:08 -0500 From: Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> Subject: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile quietly walk away from ZenKey joint venture By Mike Dano ZenKey looks dead. The company's app is not available in the major smartphone app stores. Its website does not load. And the wireless providers that launched the joint venture in 2020 are no longer supporting it. AT&T stopped supporting the service last year, according to its website: "On April 7, 2022, ZenKey will no longer offer sign in services on our websites. Once it's removed, you'll have to use your AT&T user ID and password to sign in to your AT&T account or services." https://www.lightreading.com/big-tech/atandt-verizon-t-mobile-quietly-walk-away-from-zenkey-joint-venture/d/d-id/782834 -- (Please remove QRM for direct replies)
Message-ID: <tqnkl9$3vpjb$3@dont-email.me> Date: 23 Jan 2023 22:52:09 -0500 From: Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> Subject: Verizon customers were unable to call 911 in Minneapolis, Brooklyn Center Monday morning The issue was resolved late Monday morning, according to a spokesperson with Verizon. By Dana Thiede MINNEAPOLIS — Officials say the issue involving Verizon wireless customers throughout the Twin Cities not being able to use 911 for emergencies has been resolved. According to a spokesperson with Verizon, the issue was resolved just before noon after customers were unable to call 911 for several hours Monday morning. It's unclear all the areas that were impacted, but both Minneapolis Police and Brooklyn Center Police posted on social media alternate numbers to call for emergencies. https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/911-outage-verizon-minneapolis-brooklyn-center/89-86a8732d-4fe4-460e-81df-ffedc0ce0116 -- (Please remove QRM for direct replies)
Message-ID: <tqo8r5$mra$1@shakotay.alphanet.ch> Date: 24 Jan 2023 09:36:37 -0000 From: "Marc SCHAEFER" <schaefer@alphanet.ch> Subject: Re: Status of Copper Based Landline Telephones On 23 Jan 2023 12:31:25 -0500, Albert Erdmann <telecom-digest@remove-this.bbwx.net> wrote: > I am thinking about the many lines used for fire alarm and elevator > emergency phones. Any idea what building owners are doing in this regard? In Switzerland, they had to be replaced either by GSM (and 4G/5G presumably, because 2G is already obsolete, and 3G will become obsolete soon), or VoIP. I heard of some cases where they still had the analog dialing devices (the WSG35-2 was very popular, it was a modem that could also just dial and then switch to an analog microphone). They now plugged those to the ATA port of a VoIP router. As long as the dialing device uses DTMF to dial, it works like a charm. Then you just need to either ask those systems to poll the central monitoring system every now and then to check they are still operationnal (which most of those systems did anyway in the past already). They usually used DTMF for checking-in, which works best when decoded at the ATA itself. If they used real modem modulation, they are better off replacing the modem part completely by an IP signaling or GSM system, although my tests have shown that the VoIP network can still mostly work at 2400 bits/s with e.g. V22bis seems to still work. I could not get higher speeds even with parameter tweaking and no codec conversion. I used real modems on both sides: using a DSP directly attached to the VoIP network might get much better results.
End of The Telecom Digest for Wed, 25 Jan 2023
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