TELECOM Digest     Sat, 5 Mar 2005 17:34:00 EST    Volume 24 : Issue 96

Inside This Issue:                           Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    MCI and AT&T Leave Little Guys Behind (Marcus Didius Falco)
    Conflicting Portraits Of Ebbers Drawn (Marcus Didius Falco)
    Applying 'Sell Discipline' to the (Marcus Didius Falco)
    It's Degrading: VoIP Firms Urge More FCC Action (Jack Decker)
    Re: Nokio 6010 Reporting in to Mama - Radio Interference (P McKerracher)
    Re: Nokio 6010 Reporting in to Mama - Radio Interference (Mark Atwood)
    Re: Nokio 6010 Reporting in to Mama - Radio Interference? (CharlesH)
    Re: Vonage (Flatus Ohlfahrt)
    Re: Vonage (Tony P.)
    Re: Vonage (John Levine)
    Re: Hookflash and Ground Start Analog CO Trunks From PABX (Ken Abrams)
    Re: Municipal Wi-FI and Incumbents (Tony P.)
    Re: Is Your Identity Safe? (Dan Lanciani)
    Re: New Monopoly in Dept Stores -- Federated and May Co to Merge (Henry)
    Last Laugh! Virgin Mobile Canada (exp315@canada.com)

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and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest.  

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

Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 03:11:14 -0500
From: Marcus Didius Falco <falco_marcus_didius@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: MCI and AT&T Leave Little Guys Behind


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2825-2005Mar2.html


By Yuki Noguchi

Thursday, March 3, 2005; Page E01

Lobbying against the regional Bells is about to become a lonely cause
for XO Communications Inc. of Reston.

For years, XO, MCI Inc. and AT&T Corp. were more or less comrades
fighting regional phone giants such as Verizon Communications Inc. and
SBC Communications Inc. to open up local markets and get access to the
Bells' facilities. Now MCI and AT&T plan to merge with the very
regional phone giants they lobbied against -- Verizon and SBC.

XO is a relatively small company, with about $1 billion in annual
revenue and 5,000 employees. The much larger AT&T and MCI bankrolled
many of the battles over issues central to the local phone industry
and funded advocacy groups to back them up.

But now, SBC is buying AT&T for $16 billion, and Verizon has agreed to
buy MCI for $6.75 billion. Qwest Communications International Inc.,
another regional phone company, is also bidding for MCI. That dries up
a huge chunk of funding and leaves XO among the handful of small
telecommunications companies that aren't part of the growing Baby Bell
phone empire.

"It's going to be a big decrease in funding when they walk away," said
Heather B. Gold, senior vice president for government relations for XO,
which opened a regulatory office in the District after it acquired another
independent telecom company, Allegiance TelecomInc., last year. "We will
have to build more coalitions [among the smaller companies] to replace the
single or double source of support," she said.

XO didn't always have the same interests as AT&T and MCI. XO doesn't
sell to residential consumers, for example, and owns its own network
in most major cities. It leases high-capacity lines used for business
Internet connections.

AT&T and MCI relied on regulations that allowed them to lease local
lines from the regional companies at discounted rates and resell local
phone service under their own brands. AT&T and MCI fought vigorously
to keep those discounted rates in place, but they lost the battle and
were forced to pull back from the consumer phone business.

This year AT&T and MCI won't be with XO but against it as XO fights
approval of the mergers in front of the Federal Communications
Commission.

"We plan to lobby against these mergers as anticompetitive," Gold said.

The mergers come at a time when companies like XO are already weakened
by other business dynamics. XO has been in and out of bankruptcy
protection, and in the Washington area alone, dozens of
telecommunications companies collapsed with the technology crash that
started in 2000.

Companies like Teligent Inc., E.spire Communications Inc., Net2000
Communications Inc., and WinStar LLC -- which were never lobbying
powerhouses to begin with -- fell into bankruptcy and off the radar
screen.

In recent years, AT&T actively funded advocacy groups such as Voices for
Choices, which paid for television and newspaper advertisements against
Bell-backed legislation that would have hurt the companies trying to
compete in the local markets. It also funded studies for third-party
telecommunications groups and associations.

Many of AT&T's hired guns are expected to stop lobbying for non-Bell
companies when AT&T becomes part of SBC, according to industry
sources.

Those include the LawMedia Group, a strategy group headed by former
House Judiciary Committee minority counsel Julian Epstein, and DCI
Group, another lobbying strategy group. Also likely to exit the
competitive telecom scene with the AT&T merger: Steve Ricchetti and
Charlie Black, well-connected Democratic and Republican strategists,
respectively, and co-chairmen of Voices for Choices.

AT&T general counsel Jim Ciccone, regarded as one of the industry's
most effective lobbyists, may even join forces with SBC, making that
regional giant even more effective against smaller rivals, some
say. He declined to comment.

"Clearly, it's a very different ecosystem without AT&T and MCI," said
Andrew D. Lipman, who leads the telecommunications practice at
Georgetown-based Swidler BerlinLLP, a law firm that represents MCI and
represented dozens of upstart companies allied with AT&T and MCI. "To
some extent it's like the U.S. and the U.K. pulling out of NATO."

Lipman said AT&T was a critical and much-heeded voice, not just on
Capitol Hill and at the FCC, but at the state level, where
telecommunications policies are hammered out at state utilities
commissions and legislatures.

"AT&T has offices in virtually every state capital," public utilities
commission and attorney general's office, Lipman said. That is matched
by only the regional Bells, which have their own lobbying
infrastructure to counter that, he said. "There is a recognition that
the other players are going to have to pony up to the bar and pay more
for their advocacy."

That reality is reflected in the fate of the competitive industry's
trade associations, which this week merged into a single entity.

In 2003, the Competitive Telecommunications Association (CompTel),
which represented some of those local companies, merged with the
Association of Communications Enterprises (Ascent), another
industry association, as membership numbers declined.

This week, the other remaining industry association representing these
independent telecommunications companies, ALTS, or the Association for
Local Telecommunications Services, merged with CompTel/Ascent. The
combined firm is called CompTel/ALTS.

"I feel sadness; there's no question about it," Ernest B. KellyIII,
president of Ascent until 2002, said about the fate of the hundreds of
small companies that have gone under. At Ascent's height in early
2000, it had more than 850 members. Now the combined entity has about
370. "They still have a voice," Kelly said, "but they won't have the
resources and they won't have the impact."

Copyright 2005 The Washington Post Company

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 . Hundreds of new articles daily.

*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the
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------------------------------

Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 03:13:26 -0500
From: Marcus Didius Falco <falco_marcus_didius@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Conflicting Portraits Of Ebbers Drawn


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64357-2005Mar1.html


WorldCom's Detail Man or Hands-Off Mentor?

By Brooke A. Masters
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 2, 2005; Page A01

NEW YORK -- WorldCom Inc. former chief executive Bernard J. Ebbers was
so obsessed with cutting costs that he canceled the employees' coffee
service to save $4 million. But when the company's accountants made
more than $2 billion in operating expenses simply disappear, Ebbers
never noticed, according to his testimony at his criminal trial.

Over the past five weeks, jurors in this Manhattan courtroom have been
shown two radically different faces of the entrepreneur who built
WorldCom from an obscure Mississippi phone service reseller to the
nation's second-largest long-distance firm.

One is that of a hard-charging businessman so immersed in WorldCom's
finances that he noticed $18,000 cost overruns in a $3 billion budget
and sent angry memos when he thought subordinates' presentations were
insufficiently detailed. Prosecutors say he was so driven to protect
his personal fortune in WorldCom stock that he orchestrated a scheme
to inflate the company's earnings from 2000 to 2002 by falsely
reclassifying certain operating expenses, known as line costs, as
capital expenditures.

The other view of WorldCom's chief was on full display as Ebbers, 63,
took the stand in his own defense Monday.

Describing himself as a former milkman and warehouse operator, Ebbers
told the jury he focused on hiring talented subordinates to handle
areas in which he was weak, such as technology and accounting, and
coaching them to do their best. In the crucial period of the fraud,
Ebbers said, he was in the process of disengaging from WorldCom
because he had developed heart trouble and was "embarrassed" by his
inability to understand the technology that was a growing part of his
business.

Soon jurors will have to reconcile the two pictures, or discard one,
as they decide whether to convict Ebbers of conspiracy, securities
fraud and seven counts of filing false documents with the Securities
and Exchange Commission. WorldCom filed for bankruptcy protection in
July 2002 and now operates as MCI Inc. of Ashburn.

While the government presented its case, and during parts of Ebbers's
cross-examination Tuesday, jurors saw flashes of the demanding and
details-oriented boss who dominated WorldCom for nearly two decades,
leading it through more than 65 mergers.

WorldCom's former "whiz kid" finance chief Scott D. Sullivan, who was
just 33 when Ebbers elevated him to the No. 2 job, told the jurors
that his boss could be intimidating and difficult to budge. When
Ebbers disagreed with one of Sullivan's financial decisions, Sullivan
said, "He would make comments to me in the presence of other people,
'We'll just get a new CFO, that's what we'll do.' . . . He said it in
a kidding way, but I didn't take it as a joke." Another witness quoted
Ebbers as referring to the diminutive Sullivan dismissively as "short
man" when he was displeased.

That history is why, Sullivan said, he "took it as a command to commit
accounting fraud" when Ebbers ordered him in private one-on-one
meetings to "hit the numbers" for revenue and earnings that Wall
Street analysts were expecting. "I knew it was wrong. I knew it was
against the law," said Sullivan, now 43. "I capitulated."

Ebbers said on the stand that he rarely had one-on-one conversations
with Sullivan and that the finance chief never told him about the
illegal accounting entries. "If he had, we wouldn't be here today,"
Ebbers added.

There are no documents or third-party witnesses that conclusively link
Ebbers to the fraud, so prosecutors have sought to show that Ebbers
must have known that the company was hiding line costs -- fees
WorldCom paid to use other carriers' networks -- because he was
intimately familiar with the company's finances, down to the smallest
expenses.

Budget analyst G. Brady Connor, who works at WorldCom's successor,
MCI, testified earlier that at a meeting in Atlanta, Ebbers boasted of
his cost-cutting efforts. Not only did the chief executive say he used
parking lot video cameras to monitor the length of smoking breaks and
count employees' lunchtime walks around a lake at the Clinton, Miss.,
campus, but he boasted of a trick he was using at the company's
offices in Arlington.  Connor testified that Ebbers said he was
working with a security guard "to manually fill up the bottled-water
machines with tap water, and the employees didn't know the
difference."

Ebbers, according to Connor, also said he canceled the company's
coffee service because he believed employees were stealing coffee that
WorldCom provided. The company was running through bags of coffee far
faster than it was using filters, Ebbers said, so employees must be
taking bags home.

Prosecutors have also shown the jury that Ebbers tossed around
financial terms like "incremental revenue," "cash earnings" and
"EBITDA margin" (financial speak for a kind of earnings) at meetings
with securities analysts.

During two days on the stand, Ebbers kept his temper, appearing
grandfatherly and occasionally a bit lost when the government asked
him to pick out specific information from a financial document. He
talked proudly of his five daughters and eight grandchildren and
modestly described his more than $100 million in anonymous charitable
contributions.

He smilingly acknowledged his reputation for cost-cutting, noting that
in his early career as a motel owner, he angered guests by requiring
them to return the towels they had used or pay a fee. A subordinate
had recommended the coffee service cancellation after he asked for
imaginative ways to reduce expenses, he said. "I did not ever count
coffee filters or coffee bags," he insisted. "But I can tell you I
agreed with it [the cost-saving recommendation]. . . . I don't
consider, when you are playing with shareholders' money, that $4
million is a small number."

But Ebbers repeatedly insisted that he never focused on accounting or on
the company's line costs during the period of the fraud because he trusted
Sullivan and others to handle financial matters.

"The closest thing I've ever had to an accounting course is a
preliminary course on economics," Ebbers said, adding later, "I know
what I don't know."

Ebbers testified that he had no idea WorldCom had a problem with
too-high line costs even though he traveled to Virginia in June 2001
to attend a meeting on the subject. "I was invited there by Scott
Sullivan to do my cheerleading thing and give the troops a little pep
talk," he said. Asked why a pep talk was necessary, Ebbers paused and
said, "Scott Sullivan told me there was some lack of harmony in the
group."

As Tuesday wore on, Ebbers began to wear out under cross-examination
by Assistant U.S. Attorney David B. Anders, insisting dozens of times
that he did not recall documents or incidents that his subordinates
had testified about earlier in the trial.

Ebbers said he had no memory of an October 2000 encounter with
then-controller David F. Myers at which Myers said he thought Ebbers
was apologizing for the first fraudulent accounting entry. Ebbers also
said he did not recall telling his head of investor relations,
C. Scott Hamilton, that he would be "wiped out" if the company told
Wall Street to expect lower earnings and the stock price fell as a
result.

Faced with half a dozen documents that showed line costs fluctuating
by $600 million, $700 million, even $900 million in a single month,
Ebbers looked tired and coughed as he insisted that he either had
never read the document or had not noticed the particular line item in
three budget reports he was shown.

"I did not notice that," Ebbers said.

"If I would have noticed it, we would not be here."

"I just didn't see it."

Anders pressed, "WorldCom reduced its line costs by over $2 billion and you
had no idea?"

"That's correct," replied Ebbers, who resumes the stand Wednesday.

Copyright 2005 The Washington Post Company

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 . Hundreds of new articles daily.

*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the
use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without
profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the
understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic
issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I
believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S.  Copyright Law. If you wish
to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go
beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner, in this instance, the Washington Post Company. 

For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

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

Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 03:14:46 -0500
From: Marcus Didius Falco <falco_marcus_didius@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Applying 'Sell Discipline' to the Baby Bells


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55213-2005Feb26.html

Applying 'Sell Discipline' to the Baby Bells Evergreen Manager Moves
From Acquisitive Firms to Wireless and Utility Stocks

By Danielle Kost
Bloomberg News
Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page F04

Timothy O'Brien says he revived the $300 million Evergreen Utility &
Telecommunications Fund by knowing when to sell stocks.

He decided this year to reduce his stakes in Verizon Communications
Inc.  and SBC Communications Inc. after they unveiled plans to make
acquisitions.

The Evergreen fund rose 30 percent in the past 12 months,
outperforming the 3.3 percent gain of the Standard & Poor's
Diversified Telecommunications Services Index and the 6.4 percent
advance of the S&P 500-stock index.

"As merger mania was heating up in the telecommunications space, we
were concerned that the Bell companies were more likely to be the
buyers than the sellers," said O'Brien, 50, in an interview from his
office at Evergreen Investment Services Inc. in Boston. "Typically,
you want to own the sellers."

O'Brien took over the Evergreen fund in April 2002 after it lost
almost 40 percent of value in the previous two years. Since then, the
fund has risen at an annual rate of 15 percent, tripling the average 5
percent gain of competing funds, according to data compiled by
Bloomberg.

He "really turned around the fund's performance," said Andrew Gogerty,
an analyst at mutual fund research firm Morningstar Inc. in
Chicago. "Before that, it wasn't a very strong-performing fund."

O'Brien has brought a "sell discipline" to the fund, Gogerty said. "He
won't hold onto a falling stock to see if it will turn over. He will
be the first one to admit when he makes a mistake."

O'Brien's willingness to sell is reflected in the decisions to scale
back positions in New York-based Verizon, SBC of San Antonio and
Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., companies whose shares are down or
little changed in the past year.

O'Brien has about 2 percent of his mutual fund's assets in Verizon,
SBC and BellSouth, down from as much as 3.5 percent at the start of
the year.

Verizon plans to buy MCI Inc., of Ashburn, for $6.75 billion, and SBC
is acquiring AT&T Corp. of Bedminster, N.J., for $16
billion. Atlanta-based Cingular Wireless LLC, which is owned jointly
by SBC and BellSouth, paid $41.3 billion to buy AT&T Wireless Services
Inc. in October.

None of the transactions will provide an immediate boost to profits,
O'Brien said. MCI emerged from the largest U.S. bankruptcy in history
in April, and AT&T's revenue fell for a 20th straight quarter in the
final three months of last year.

O'Brien holds about 60 stocks, which account for about 90 percent of
the fund's investments. The rest of the assets are split between bonds
and cash.

One of the fund's best-performing stocks is its largest holding, TXU
Corp.  Shares of Texas's biggest power producer almost tripled in the
past year.  Only Apple Computer Inc. has done better among companies
in the S&P 500.

The Evergreen fund increased its stake in TXU in October 2002, a year
in which the stock fell 66 percent as the company cut jobs and its
dividend.  TXU chief executive C. John Wilder was hired a year ago to
improve the company's finances. He has been selling assets and
reducing the company's debt. The stock closed Friday at $78.20 a
share.

TXU has been "a home run for us," said O'Brien, who has degrees from
the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and the University of
Pennsylvania's Wharton School in Philadelphia. Before joining
Evergreen, he oversaw similar funds for Eaton Vance Corp. and Gabelli
Asset Management Inc.  While O'Brien has reduced the fund's positions
in telecom companies, he has increased its wireless holdings. He added
to his position in Western Wireless Corp. during the third quarter and
initiated one in Leap Wireless International Inc. in August.

"I wouldn't call them household names," O'Brien said.

Western Wireless sells mobile-phone services in 19 western
U.S. states. The Bellevue, Wash.-based firm benefits from operating in
rural markets with fewer competitors. Last month, Alltel Corp., the
sixth-largest U.S.  wireless company, agreed to buy it for $4.42
billion. Shares of Western Wireless gained 56 percent in the past year
and finished the week at $39.24.

Leap Wireless, a company spun off from Qualcomm Inc. that sells
unlimited local wireless calling services at a flat rate, emerged from
Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August. The San Diego-based
company's shares have risen 2.1 percent since then and closed Friday
at $27.15. Leap Wireless added a net 29,000 customers in the fourth
quarter for a total gain of about 97,000 for the year.

"They've got a strong balance sheet," O'Brien said. "They kind of fly
underneath the radar."

Exelon Corp., created in a merger five years ago by utilities in
Philadelphia and Chicago, is the fund's second-largest investment. The
owner of utilities has increased profit by cutting jobs and boosting
sales from low-cost nuclear plants. It agreed to buy Public Service
Enterprise Group Inc. for $12.8 billion in December, the biggest
utility acquisition in U.S. history. Exelon's stock rose 33 percent in
the past year. It ended the week at $45.50 "The company has been very
sensible," O'Brien said.

Copyright 2005 The Washington Post Company

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 . Hundreds of new articles daily.

*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the
use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without
profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the
understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic
issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I
believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S.  Copyright Law. If you wish
to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go
beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner, in this instance, the Washington  Post Company.

For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

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

From: Jack Decker <jack-yahoogroups@withheld at request>
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 23:09:22 -0500
Subject: It's Degrading: VoIP Firms Urge More FCC Action


http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/erp/article.php/3487686

It's Degrading: VoIP Firms Urge More FCC Action

By Roy Mark

Internet telephony firms praised Thursday's action by the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) to fine a small telecom for blocking
Voice over Internet Protocol (define) traffic, but said problems of
keeping broadband networks open to all IP applications remain.

Over the last six months, both consumer VoIP provider Vonage and
wholesaler Nuvio complained to the FCC about both telecom and cable
broadband providers either blocking or degrading VoIP calls. In some
cases, the providers offer their own VoIP service and in Vonage's and
Nuvio's opinion are discriminating against unaffiliated VoIP
companies.

Thursday, Madison River Communications of Mebane, N.C., which owns and
operates four rural telephone companies in Georgia, Alabama, North
Carolina and Illinois, admitted no guilt in port blocking complaints
brought by Vonage, but agreed to a $15, 000 fine and promised to drop
the practice.

Chris Murray, Vonage's director of government affairs, said in Madison
River's case, one of the company's subsidiaries was blocking VoIP
calls to and from a customer who chose to get VoIP service instead of
leasing a second, hard-wired telephone line.

"They gave no notice [to the customer]. [His Vonage service] had been
working and one day he woke up and it didn't work," Murray said.

Full story at:
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/erp/article.php/3487686


How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home:
http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html

If you live in Michigan, subscribe to the MI-Telecom group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MI-Telecom/

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

From: Phil McKerracher <phil@mckerracher.org>
Subject: Re: Nokia 6010 Reporting in to Mama -- Radio Interference?
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:24:39 GMT


Joseph <JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:telecom24.94.8@telecom-digest.org:

> On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 15:59:30 -0500, Ted Koppel <tkoppel@adelphia.net>
> wrote:

>> My new Nokia 6010 has an interesting and somewhat annoying habit.  If
>> it's anywhere within a 5 foot radius of my PC speakers, I can hear it
>> periodically transmitting something (sort of a rhythmic
>> dum-diddy-dum-diddy-dum-dum-dum).  Sounds like static, but definitely
>> with a paced rhythm.  I haven't timed the intervals exactly, but it
>> seems to take place every 17-20 minutes.  In a related activity, I
>> hear a big burst of static on my PC speakers, and then some rhythmic
>> noise, about 5-7 seconds before the cell phone begins to ring.

>> This is the first cell phone I've had that caused these noises.  Do I
>> have a mutant phone?  Is this anything to be concerned about?

> It's not just the Nokia 6010.  *Any* GSM will exhibit the
> characteristics you refer to.  It's the phone communicating with the
> system periodically...

True. I was told by a contact at ETSI (the organisation that defined
many of the GSM standards) that this was originally an oversight --
they had not realised that the modulation scheme was effectively 100%
amplitude modulation, which would be "detected" by any rectifying
circuit nearby. It caused a lot of consternation in the early days.

The "solution" they eventually agreed was to reduce the power
transmitted by the phones by a factor of 10. This had been proposed
anyway, to reduce the cell size and hence increase system capacity
(also to increase battery life).

Phil McKerracher
www.mckerracher.org

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

Subject: Re: Nokia 6010 Reporting in to Mama -- Radio Interference?
From: Mark Atwood <mark@atwood.name>
Organization: EasyNews, UseNet made Easy!
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:46:32 GMT


>> My new Nokia 6010 has an interesting and somewhat annoying habit.  If
>> it's anywhere within a 5 foot radius of my PC speakers, I can hear it
>> periodically transmitting something (sort of a rhythmic
>> dum-diddy-dum-diddy-dum-dum-dum).  Sounds like static, but definitely
>> with a paced rhythm.  I haven't timed the intervals exactly, but it
>> seems to take place every 17-20 minutes.  In a related activity, I
>> hear a big burst of static on my PC speakers, and then some rhythmic
>> noise, about 5-7 seconds before the cell phone begins to ring.

We've been hearing those beeps on the peecee speakers at our office
for some weeks now, and never figured out what was causing them until
I read this post.


Mark Atwood       |  When you do things right, people won't be sure
mark@atwood.name  |  you've done anything at all.
http://mark.atwood.name/  http://www.livejournal.com/users/fallenpegasus

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

From: CharlesH <hoch@exemplary.invalid>
Subject: Re: Nokia 6010 Reporting in to Mama -- Radio Interference?
Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 04:17:11 GMT


Joseph wrote:

> On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 15:59:30 -0500, Ted Koppel <tkoppel@adelphia.net>
> wrote:

>> My new Nokia 6010 has an interesting and somewhat annoying habit.  If
>> it's anywhere within a 5 foot radius of my PC speakers, I can hear it
>> periodically transmitting something (sort of a rhythmic
>> dum-diddy-dum-diddy-dum-dum-dum).  Sounds like static, but definitely
>> with a paced rhythm.  I haven't timed the intervals exactly, but it
>> seems to take place every 17-20 minutes.  In a related activity, I
>> hear a big burst of static on my PC speakers, and then some rhythmic
>> noise, about 5-7 seconds before the cell phone begins to ring.

>> This is the first cell phone I've had that caused these noises.  Do I 
>> have a mutant phone?  Is this anything to be concerned about?

> It's not just the Nokia 6010.  *Any* GSM will exhibit the
> characteristics you refer to.  It's the phone communicating with the
> system periodically.  You'll hear the buzz-buzz even more when the
> 6010 is ringing.  You'll hear a different type of interference when a
> TDMA phone rings (more like a low hum.)  It's normal and your phone is
> not defective.

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The first time this happened to me, I
> was walking around downtown. My cellular phone (and its holder) were
> clipped on my belt. Right next to that was my Walkman FM radio which
> was also clipped on my belt, and I was listening to it through my
> headphones. Suddenly the radio started humming and buzzing, as though
> there was some interference nearby. I wondered to myself, what is 
> going on there in Potts (I was walking right past the Potts Funeral
> Home when it started). I got a few steps beyong Potts and the inter-
> ference stopped. I found out later it was a call coming in on the 
> cell phone; apparently the cell tower had been trying to locate me for
> the call. I did not realize it at the moment, and just thought it was
> some kind of spurious interference noise. But later at home, I sat the
> cellular phone on a table next to my Bose radio, and I was not wearing
> my headphones (so I could hear the phone 'ringing' [or actually
> giving its electronic chirp of a call coming in]) and the Bose radio
> did the same thing: played a spurt of interference noise when it was
> happening. I just assumed either the cell phone or the Bose radio was
> faulty. Your explanation helped explain it.  PAT]

This kind of interference is specific to phones which use a TDMA (Time
Division Multiple Access) protocol (such as GSM), where the phone
transmits only during its time slice several hundred times per second,
resulting in a pulsing which causes the observed interference. CDMA
(Code Division Multiple Access) phones, when they are in a call or
doing occasional bookkeeping with cellular system, transmit
continuously over a wide frequency range (1.25MHz, for example), and
do not cause interference like this. In fact, without knowing the
specific pattern being used by the phone, it is practically impossible
to distinguish its signal from background noise. Which is one reason
(along with the difficulty of jamming it), that the military was
interested in CDMA long before there were cellular phones.

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

From: Flatus Ohlfahrt <flatus@militaryretired.us>
Subject: Re: Vonage
Date: 5 Mar 2005 00:27:25 GMT
Organization: USAF Ret


On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 19:25:59 GMT, Henry Cabot Henhouse III
wrote in news:telecom24.95.2@telecom-digest.org: 

> So, anyone else notice that Vonage has taken a dump?  I've
> tried from a number of different networks, nada, zip,
> kerflunk. 

> Busy when you navigate thru the voice mail, no response
> from the website, mungled voice response when you call
> their main number. 

> Ya know, all this just to save $20 a month.

> I'm porting my number BACK to Verizon. At least they don't
> have these stupid VOIP outages and calls that sound like
> you're in a sfx chamber.

> Bah!

We've had Vonage for about a year and a half. For us, it's been steady
improvement. The few outages we've experienced have been cable company
related.

 From the performance you describe, it certainly sounds as if the 
problems may be related to your particular installation.

Flatus

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

From: Tony P. <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net>
Subject: Re: Vonage
Organization: ATCC
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 19:56:50 -0500


In article <telecom24.95.2@telecom-digest.org>,
sooper_chicken@hotmail.com says:

> So, anyone else notice that Vonage has taken a dump?  I've tried from
> a number of different networks, nada, zip, kerflunk.

> Busy when you navigate thru the voice mail, no response from the
> website, mungled voice response when you call their main number.

> Ya know, all this just to save $20 a month.

> I'm porting my number BACK to Verizon. At least they don't have
> these stupid VOIP outages and calls that sound like you're in a sfx
> chamber.

> Bah!

They definitely have some problems in different parts of the country but 
my service in the northeast has been rock solid. I wonder -- I know I'm 
on a Paetec switch so is it a Focal issue? 

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

Date: 5 Mar 2005 04:46:26 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
Subject: Re: Vonage
Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA


> So, anyone else notice that Vonage has taken a dump?  I've tried from
> a number of different networks, nada, zip, kerflunk.

> Busy when you navigate thru the voice mail, no response from the
> website, mungled voice response when you call their main number.

No kidding.  I ported my number to Lingo almost a month ago due to
Vonage's poor service and non-existent support, and I'm still trying
to get hold of someone at Vonage who can cancel my account.  Perhaps
they'll notice that I cancelled the credit card.

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

From: Ken Abrams <k_abrams@[REMOVETHIS] sbcglobal.net>
Subject: Re: Hookflash and Ground Start Analog CO Trunks From PABX
Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 23:12:25 GMT


Robert Bonomi <bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com> wrote

> Do you even understand the difference between a _POTS_ (analog "loop
> start") line, and a "ground start" (aka "wink start") *trunk* line?

The real question IS:

Why is Robert questioning someone else's understanding when he has so
little himself?

Loop start lines are not always analog and ground start and wink start
are two ENTIRELY different things.

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

From: Tony P. <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net>
Subject: Re: Municipal Wi-FI and Incumbents
Organization: ATCC
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 19:59:50 -0500


In article <telecom24.95.7@telecom-digest.org>, cjmebox-
telecomdigest@yahoo.com says:

> This is from yesterday's Guardian. It includes an interesting
> juxtaposition of Verizon's and BT's positions on municipal Wi-Fi
> networks.

> http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,,1428626,00.html

> Excerpt:
> .....
> So far, so good. But city hall soon ran into serious problems that
> could stifle the wireless dreams of municipalities across the world. US
> cable companies, which see citizen-funded networks as a threat to their
> commercial fiefdoms, backed a bill that effectively outlawed municipal
> wireless in the state of Pennsylvania. In December, the state passed a
> bill forbidding any municipality in the state from running an
> "information network". Only a last-minute deal with Verizon, the
> state's de facto monopoly provider of broadband, saved Philadelphia's
> vision. Verizon promised to allow the city's network, but at the
> expense of the rest of the state. At least 15 US states are considering
> similar telco-backed bills to ban municipal networks.

> To Dianah Neff, Philadelphia's chief information officer, municipal
> wireless is no mere luxury. Neff, a veteran public servant, sees
> municipal networks as a potential leveller in a city where 70% of state
> school children receive free school meals. "We have a vibrant
> downtown," she says, "but we need to make sure all our neighbourhoods
> can compete in the knowledge economy.

> ..........

> Chris Clark, chief executive for BT Wireless Broadband, said the UK's
> biggest broadband supplier would not be taking the same approach as
> Verizon. "The community wireless projects, which started in an
> environment of concern about rural service, are evolving into providing
> all sorts of innovative services," he says. "It would be a pity to see
> such innovation stifled. More recently, a number of metropolitan
> wireless projects have been in the pipeline. BT is fully supportive of
> these initiatives."

> TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: City of Independence was looking very
> favorably at muni-wi-fi for our town, but SBC -- Southwestern Bell -- 
> put a kibosh on it, threatening to get the state commission to do a
> rule like that proposed for Pennsylvania. SBC did not like the idea
> at all of a community giving away for free the DSL service they
> charge an arm and a leg for.   PAT]

And we all know why Verizon and SBC don't like the idea. First - Skype
is now available for the Palm OS. So tell me, what happens when for
say $10 a month you can use the muni network. You load Skype on your
laptop or PDA and use it to make and receive calls while in the city.

This kills both wire line and wireless. The incumbent carriers are 
scared. They can see that their years of reliance on tariff are coming 
to a crashing halt. 



[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I did something sort of exciting for
me a couple days ago. Our local McDonalds has a WiFi network but I
have never seen anyone use it. So when I went over for lunch the
other day, I took along my IBM ThinkPad laptop (it is a really
ancient model, the 770, but it is networked both with wires and
with my wireless NetGear router card) and played around on line 
with it while I had lunch. PAT]

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

Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2005 01:59:57 EST
From: Dan Lanciani <ddl@danlan.com>
Subject: Re: Is Your Identity Safe?


kludge@panix.com Fri Mar  4 10:14:28 2005 wrote:

> Dan Lanciani  <ddl@danlan.com> wrote:

>> I think you've missed the point.  In spite of what the banks may tell
>> you, there is no reason for the information required by an entity to
>> verify your identity to also be sufficient for that entity to
>> impersonate you.  The attitude of, 'we need to know all about you so
>> we can be sure who you are' (and consumers' acceptance of that
>> attitude) is exactly the problem.

> Then how can it be complete to verify your identity?

The currently fashionable approach would be for the credit agency (or
equivalent) to hold the consumer's public key and deliver it to the
bank or other entity desiring to verify the consumer's identity.  The
consumer could then sign the credit application (or whatever) with her
secret key, proving her identity.  (There are details, of course, and
the application should probably be encrypted with the bank's
well-known public key.)  An advantage of using public key crypto is
that even the credit agency doesn't have enough information to
impersonate the consumer.

If you don't like public key crypto and you don't mind that the credit
agency (but not the bank) has enough information to impersonate the
consumer then take a look at Kerberos's model.  It can provide mutual
authentication of two parties without giving either enough information
to impersonate the other, all using traditional symmetric crypto.

One nice thing about both approaches is that they could be phased in
in such a way that they were completely optional both for consumers
and banks.  Let consumers register their public keys with the credit
agencies who could then deliver them along with all the other personal
data.  Let banks use them for verification if they so choose.  (Maybe
provide a little incentive by saying that if a consumer registers a
key and the bank decides not to use it and there is fraud the bank is
strongly presumed to be at fault.)

Another feature is that unlike biometric and SecureID schemes, these
approaches do not require the deployment of esoteric hardware.  More
importantly, since the required computing equipment on the consumer's
end is working only for the consumer (i.e., it is not attempting to
conceal something from its owner) it can be implemented as software on
general purpose machines, e.g., desktops and PDAs.  Chances are that
the majority of consumers interested in registering their keys already
have the required hardware.  (This is not to say that the banks
couldn't develop a nice easy-to-use crypto appliance for those who
don't want to use general-purpose machines.)

To extend the approach to frequent transactions it would be a good
idea to add an IrDa port to ATMs so they could talk to PDAs directly.
(You don't want the consumer to have to copy long strings of digits by
hand.)  Again this does not require the bank to issue special "secure"
hardware to the consumer because the PDA works for its owner, not for
the bank.

> The information that verifies that you are who you are is exactly the
> same information that verifies that someone else is who you are.

That's true, and it is why there is ultimately no solution for the
simple duress problem.  The best we can do with something known is
prove that that something is indeed known.  However, we can contrive
to do this in such a way that the something known is not disclosed in
the process.  And the entity to whom we are making the proof does not
itself need to know the something at any time.  That solves the
phishing problem and the unintentional-disclosure-by-central-agency
problem.

Dan Lanciani
ddl@danlan.*com

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

From: henry999@eircom.net (Henry)
Subject: Re: New Monopoly in Dept Stores -- Federated and May Co to Merge
Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2005 17:48:51 +0200
Organization: Elisa Internet customer


<Wesrock@aol.com> wrote:

> ... in Kansas, and I have patronized several in Wellington ...

Ah -- Wellington, Kansas. I haven't thought about that town in years
but it holds a special spot in my life story. It was the first place I
was ever served in a bar, almost 40 years ago.

I was 16 years old and on a cross-country trip with my 17-year-old
high school buddy and his parents. The parents had friends in
Wellington and we stayed with them a night or two. One evening while
the old folks were gabbing, my pal and I went to check out the town.

We went into a bar where there wasn't much happening and started
playing pool. There was a sign on the wall that said something like:
'In order to play pool you must show your draft card" -- the draft card,
of course, being required in those days when a male turned 18.

Well, we shot pool for a while and nobody seemed bothered -- nobody
asked to see the cards, anyway -- so we started to wonder: If they
think we're 18, maybe we can get a beer? I still had some growing to
do at that point; I was about 5'3" and I wrestled in the 112-pound
class. My friend was taller, heavier and shaving every day, so he went
up to the bar while I sat at the table. By golly, a minute later there
he was, coming back with two bottles of Coors.

Cheers,

Henry


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Smile ... thanks for sharing
that. Kansas, like Chicago, IL, was a different place forty years ago,
but to a large extent, Kansas has been able to stay the way it was
'back then' ... I think what I like best about small town, Kansas is
that although almost everyone knows everyone else, we all tend to mind
our own business and expect others to do the same. The courtesy and
'laid back' attitudes around here are hard to find in larger cities. 
PAT]

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

From: Exp315@canada.com
Subject: Last Laugh! Virgin Mobile Canada
Date: 5 Mar 2005 13:18:28 -0800


Question to Virgin Mobile Canada: will your Canadian service link up
with your U.S. service?

Answer: We are experiencing technical difficulties. Your email was not
sent to us, please try again later.

Way to inspire confidence guys!

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


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