From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Jun 2 19:58:33 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.3) id i52NwWK01726; Wed, 2 Jun 2004 19:58:33 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 19:58:33 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200406022358.i52NwWK01726@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #273 TELECOM Digest Wed, 2 Jun 2004 19:57:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 273 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Wi-Fi TV Not Ready For Prime Time (Monty Solomon) Red-Flag Case Gets Green Light (Monty Solomon) Re: DSL vs. Cable Modem? (Barry Margolin) A Telephone For Recording/Publishing Conference Calls (Phil Earnhardt) International Dialing to the UK in 1978/79 (Keith) Re: Memories of Illinois Bell in Better Times (Lisa Hancock) WW II Britain-U.S. Telephone Links? (Lisa Hancock) Re: AT| Commands (jdj) Word Documents Without MS Word (Ron Chapman) Re: 'Pirate Act' Raises Civil Rights Concerns (Keith) VOIP on My Home Network (Bill) Jeff Pulver Pulls Few Punches - VoIP Pioneer Juggles Businesses (VOIP News) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 09:48:57 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Wi-Fi TV Not Ready for Prime Time By Elisa Batista For folks who have a tough time leaving their TV sets even to cook or use the bathroom, a few Japanese companies have come up with a way to let customers bring their tubes with them. Electronics makers Sony, Sharp and Casio have created flat-panel displays about the size of a thin spiral notebook that let consumers watch their TV shows wirelessly in any room in the house. The monitors receive their signals from a base station with a Wi-Fi transmitter. http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,63680,00.html ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 13:08:11 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Red-Flag Case Gets Green Light From Broadcasting & Cable, June 1, 2004 By Bill McConnell A Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C., won't delay the case determining the fate of the Federal Communications Commission's "broadcast flag," despite a request by the agency to slow down. A coalition of consumer activist groups and library associations have asked the court to strike down the FCC's mandate, which requires digital TV's and recording devices to honor codes producers can insert into programs to prevent retransmission over the Internet. The FCC asked the court to delay the case until the agency finished its own reconsideration of the rules. Broadcasters and Hollywood fought for the rules to protect high-definition movies and other digital content from unauthorized distribution. Opponents, however, say the restriction violates consumers' home recording rights and that the FCC has no jurisdiction to impose the rules. http://www.freepress.net/news/article.php?id=3709 ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Re: DSL vs. Cable Modem? Organization: Looking for work Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 00:46:53 -0400 In article , Robert A. Fink, M. D. wrote: > The main reason for the choice (of cable) was the fact that our local > DSL carrier (SBC/Yahoo) has some pretty nasty billing practices (they > give you less than 25 days to pay your phone bill and then start > hassling you over the phone). Expecting you to pay your bill on time is "nasty"? Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Oh, its no more nasty than expecting telco to honor its self-stated commitments to do certain kinds of installs when they say they will, or correct billing errors when they promised they would. Its no more nasty than asking telco to substantiate some item on your bill and them responding they will 'have to order the paperwork (take your pick) 'from the warehouse' (or) 'from the long distance company who applied the item to your bill'. In either case, 45 days is the norm to get the paperwork. But when it comes time for you to pay the bill, by God, why would you need more time to audit your bill, etc? Telco thinks they are something really special, you know. They'll get around to supplying documention when they get around to it, but when they come up with the bill you had better drop everything and pay the bill. SBC took money out of my bank account twice one month, (having caught both the bank and me off guard), and when I called them about it the routine was 'well, we have to investigate it and see if what you say is true; if so, we will issue a check to you to pay it back, that might be 30-45 days. In the meantime, you just hang out there to dry.' No more nasty than telco can be at times, Barry. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Phil Earnhardt Subject: A Telephone For Recording/Publishing Conference Calls Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 12:22:58 -0600 Organization: http://newsguy.com I'd like to have a telephone with the following features: 1. A single-line telephone with: 2. A 2.5mm jack for headset. 3. The ability to record the conversation digitally by pushing a single button on the telephone. Capacity should nominally be an hour and could be extended by adding a digital memory card. 4. A USB interface to transfer the recordings to a PC or a MAC. The phone should appear as an external disk drive to the PC/MAC. The intent is to have a device that would be easy for non-technical types to capture a recording of the conversation with reasonably high fidelity and publish it on an intranet/internet or onto CDs. Does anyone make a device that does all of this? What can I piece together to do this inexpensively? TIA. --phil [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Mike Sandman has the parts you need to cobble all this together. From the phone handset or base, you plug into the sound card on your computer, then treat the audio as you wish. Contact Mike at mike@sandman.com or look at his catalog on line at http://sandman.com or call his office at 630-980-7710. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Keith Subject: International Dialing to the UK in 1978/79 Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 15:59:27 -0400 At the end of Pink Floyd's "Young Lust", there are some in-band signaling MF tones which I've found to be: 3:13.101 480hz tone starts 3.13.881 MF toning starts Entire MF string is 'KP1' 0 4 4 8 3 1 'ST' This was an operator-assisted phone call that was recorded calling from the US to the UK circa 1978/1979. The is just that, much shorter in duration than the rest of the digits. 39ms vs 68ms. This might be where a portion of digits were deleted, etc. Plus, there is not the normal 50ms interdigit delay between the 1 and the 8. Anyone know what's happening here? Would this be a valid operator pattern for a call? It sure looks like they were trying to get the New York, NY, overseas sender with the "183", but I didn't know one could prefix the sender with the country code like this. It's quite possible that the song is missing some digits too, so perhaps it's really "KP1 0 4 4 1 x x x x 8 3 1 ST". Does anyone know what the correct number of digits for a phone number in the UK would be at this point? How long would the city codes be, local phone numbers, etc. (in 1978/79)? Thanks. Keith M ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Memories of Illinois Bell in Better Times Date: 2 Jun 2004 10:24:47 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Not only did Woolworth have lunch counters > but Walgreen had lunch counters also, and in a couple of larger cities > at least (Chicago comes to mind) large cafeterias as well. I forgot to mention in my previous post about telephones in lunch counters. Normally it was standard to have at least one public phone in such places. In small ones, the phone doubled as the phone for the business, sometimes having an extension connected to it with a note on the phone to listen before inserting coins. Bigger busy lunch counters could have a battery of pay phones. But a big exception was the McDonald's fast food chain. Roy Kroc, its builder, forbid payphones at the McD's. The reason was that he didn't want kids hanging out at the outlets making/receiving phone calls on the pay phone. While Kroc wanted the business of the teenagers, he didn't want them hanging around and making trouble. His initial design was drive up, buy, drive away, no hanging around. The garish lighting and red/white tile was designed for that. Later on he added indoor seating but still no pay phones. Indeed, to this day I think it's unusual to find a pay phone inside a fast food outlet, though sometimes there's one not far on the street. Undesirable loitering was a factor that killed off many city cafeteria chains. A cafeteria could survive if perhaps one person in a corner sat around. But too many dishelved people took up too many tables and turned off too many prospective customers. I continued to eat at Horn & Hardart's, for example, but many people avoided them because the other customers were too seedy. Indeed, I'd get discouraged, too. Years ago, a soda fountain was a standard fixture of a drugstore. Our neighborhood drugstore had one, but closed it in the early 1960s to make room for other items. When I was little my father took me there for a chocolate soda. Indeed, the neighborhood drugstore soda fountain was the stuff of sweet Hollywood stories of the late 1940s -- boy meets girl at the soda fountain, young farm girl "discovered" in a Hollywood drugstore, etc. Another common fixture of old drugstores was a telephone booth. In cities, a lot of people didn't have phones and that booth was used for incoming and outgoing calls. Kids would pick up a nickel tip running to get someone who had a phone call. The above drugstore had such a booth until the drugstore closed altogether (around the 1980s). The phonebooth was nice -- it had a little seat and table under the phone, the light and fan went on when the door closed. You could control the fan with a switch by the phone. To keep her costs down, my mother would go to the drugstore to call her sister who lived in a town 60 miles away. My frugal mother thought tax wasn't charged on pay phone calls (although it was), and further, the need to put coins in kept her call to three minutes. In the 1960s, a 60 mile long distance call was 45 cents in coin, 40 cents from home (plus tax). (I always liked it when the quarter dropped and made the boing sound). My mother and her sister also wrote postcards to each other constantly. In more recent years, I noticed no more postcards and I asked my mother why she stopped. She explained that she had "5c a minute Sundays" and spent time liberally on the phone instead. Also by then my mother wasn't quite as frugal and didn't mind running up long distance charges to talk to her sister, daughter, granddaughter, or nieces in distant places. In the town where I live now, we had an independent drugstore that still had a soda fountain. The owner said it didn't make him money, but he did it for the town. Unfortunately, the owner ran afoul of the town's new historic preservation ordnance law. In essence*, the drugstore had to close, despite the historic value of the fountain and the niceness (IMHO) of having an independent (not chain) pharmacist. We have now have a CVS. [*Suffice it to say I learned by experience that historic preservation laws have many problems, but that is beyond the scope of the telecom newsgroup.] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here in Independence, Kansas, our downtown drugstore (DeFever-Osborne Rexall Drugs, 205 North Penn Street) has a soda fountain, but the menu is quite limited. Vanilla and chocolate ice cream creations of your choice, a few types of microwaved sandwiches, a single flavor of soup each day and chilli or similar. No payphone; that was removed several years ago. The woman who runs it (like a franchise part of the drugstore) closes promptly at 5 each weekday afternoon and noon on Saturdays. Still the marble- top counter, the original swivel stools to sit on, etc. Like all of our downtown area (since Walmart moved into town in 2000) it does not get a lot of use. A lot of pictures hanging on the walls from the 1920's when Independence used to be an oil town, and such personages as Harry Sinclair (Sinclair Oil) and Vivian Vance (old Hollywood movie star) were residents here. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: WW II Britain-U.S. telephone links? Date: 2 Jun 2004 10:33:45 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Prior to WW II, the U.S. and Britain had overseas telephone service by radio carrier. I'm not sure how reliable the circuits were at the time, according to the Bell System history they used both short-wave and long wave depending on time of day, sunspots, and other issues. Further, the circuits needed constant adjustment while in use. None the less, they were available to telephone users to make overseas calls. After the war broke out, how were the radio circuits utilized? Could private parties (such as businessmen) continue to make calls on them? Given the criticiality of shipping war goods to England, that was a vital link for business people. Were the circuits of value to the military and politicians due to being radio lines open to evesdropping? (IIRC, they developed some crude frequency shifters -- were they in use?) Could a U.S. serviceman in England theorectically call home on such lines, assuming he had the money to pay for it? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: During World War Two, the United States government nationalized the Western Electric Company; all of their output during those years went to the government as part of the war effort. Telephone instruments were rationed. Bell asked subscribers to 'consider' giving up extra extensions in their homes and offices in order that new subscribers without instruments at all could be served. All long distance circuits were also rationed, and top priority was given to military needs. In Chicago, for example, while '211' was used to reach the long distance operator (in those areas like downtown which had been converted to dial) '811' was reserved for 'priority long distance calling' (meaning military use for authorized governent use). And since during that 'good war' everyone felt inclined to do all they could for soldiers and sailors, they made their personal calls on '811' priority lines also. If there was an instance where all the circuits between A and B were in use, and an authorized military person needed to make a priority call, then the cord board operator was authorized to go in on an existing call, speak up to the parties and announce "priority call waiting, I need the circuit" and give the parties three to five seconds to terminate, although some operators just said 'priority, I need the line' and pulled the connection down with no other warning. But soldier/sailor military use was also on a rationed basis. The government entrusted AT&T to handle much of this. A very old newspaper advertisement from the Christian Science Monitor in 1943 explained it to the general public: At the top of the full page advertisement, a sailor with a phone to his ear; a smile on his face, then a symbol for electrical wires to a phone on the other side of the page, where a mother and father and children and grandma were all crowded around a phone, trying to listen as mother talked to her son, the sailor. In the center of top part of the page, a phone switchboard with an operator making the connection. The same ad was in the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers and other publications of those days. The text said, "As part of the War Effort, the Telephone Company is playing an important role; helping our soldiers and sailors stay in touch with their loved ones. AT&T is proud that the government has entrusted our operators to be part of the effort, by telling us some important, but secret information about troop movements. You generally receive at least two telephone calls from our operators. The first one is to announce that your loved one or family member will be calling on the phone at a certain time, at least several hours or perhaps a day later. This is so you can tell everyone to gather by the phone when that important call arrives, and have your line open and available. Then when *the* call arrives, please answer promptly, as the time allowed for each call is limited to a few minutes. *Do not* question our operator about the origin of the call or otherwise argue with her. She has been instructed to tell you nothing, and will not violate the trust the government has placed in her. Do not question your loved one about his location or exactly what he is doing. He will tell you everything he is allowed to say at this time of war. Don't risk getting him in trouble with his buddies or superior officers. He would love to tell you more, if only he was allowed to do so. Remember, just as our goverment will be listening to these phone calls, so will our enemies if they choose to do so. From your friends at the Telephone Company, AT&T and Associated Companies." Then was the bell-shaped symbol they used to use with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company notation. Then near the bottom of the page, a stern-faced Uncle Sam with his lips pursed, and fingers across his lips. Uncle Sam is saying 'Remember, Loose Lips Sink Ships! Cooperate entirely with the Operator when she brings our boys to the phone to speak with you.' PAT] ------------------------------ From: jdj Subject: Re: AT| Commands Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 10:50:00 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 22:11:40 +0000, dol wrote: > jdj wrote: >> Where can I find a list of "AT|" commands? [snip] > Did you literally mean AT| ? Yes. None of the typical modem info sites seem to have it. Most link to multitech, which chose not to publish the info. Search engines are useless as they ignore the "|". On Tue, 01 Jun 2004 19:26:20 -0700, Al Gillis wrote: > Try this: > http://www.computerhope.com/atcom.htm Sorry, nothing there. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Some search engines allow you to 'quote' the pipe or escape (back slash) the pipe to get it accepted literally as text. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 2004 23:10:47 -0400 From: Ron Chapman Subject: Word Documents Without MS Word Jack said: > I realize that, but Wordpad won't always read a Word document (or won't > display certain types of embedded images), and also not everyone uses a > Windows-based system. I was thinking that maybe the Linux and Macintosh > users might need some way to access these documents, but then again, > perhaps they already have some way of dealing with .doc files? Macintosh users already have a program to read Word documents. It's called TextEdit. Macintosh users have a whole host of Postscript and PDF capabilities at their fingertips, too. A bunch of functionality is built into the Macintosh system. ------------------------------ From: Keith Subject: Re: 'Pirate Act' Raises Civil Rights Concerns Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2004 08:54:17 -0400 Right, this guy is a kook all the way. Even the RIAA said, "blow up the users machines ... ummmm, that might be a little harsh" You know when the RIAA disagrees with an enforcement method, then you really know the senator is out of control. Perhaps the $157,000+ he has received from the TV/Movies/Music has influenced the type of bills he proposes? http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/indus.asp?CID=N00009869&cycle=2004 Keith "J Kelly" wrote in message news:telecom23.272.10@telecom-digest.org: > Hatch is a recording artist so in my opinion has a little > conflict of interest in all of this. This is the same guy that wanted > to destroy music downloaders machines last year. ------------------------------ From: bill_airjunky@hotmail.com (Bill) Subject: VOIP on My Home Network Date: 1 Jun 2004 23:28:00 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com I installed Vonage's VOIP on my home LAN tonite and have run into an issue. Currently my config looks like this: Scientific Atlanta cable modem -> Motorola VT1000V WAN port Motorola VT1000V PC port -> Netgear FVS318 LAN port Then I configured the cable companies' DNS servers in the setup on each PC, the VT1000V & the Netgear switch. I then use DHCP on the VT1000V & disable it on the FVS318. This config allows voice & data to work. The only issue is that the above config does not work with the Netgear's WAN port so it's VPN & Dynamic DNS features don't work. I tried connecting the VT1000V to one of the LAN ports on the FVS318 but the VT1000V never initializes correctly. I looked thru Motorola's website & they say that it should work to hook up the VT1000V to one of a switch's LAN port, although they don't list the FVS318 specifically. I suspect it's because this switch does not support VOIP. Any chance of anyone ever having done this? Or am I paving new ground here? Bill [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I do not think that will work. At least it did not for me. When I had my original Vonage setup, I had Vonage as just one of the ports on my NetGear (and before that, Linksys) router. When Vonage sent me the new Motorola MTA they said 'put it in front of the other stuff' which I did, just as you have done. But now we have in essence *two* firewalls out there; the NetGear router being one firewall (192.168.0.1) and the Motorola MTA (192.168.102.1) being the other one. My Motorola SurfBoard modem can be tinkered with from the address 192.168.100.1 . Notice how your NetGear router now has *two addresses*? 192.168.0.1 from on the LAN looking out to the world and 192.168.102.1 looking at it from the Motorola MTA (which the NetGear considers the 'outside world' in to your machines? You might try going into 192.168.102.1 (Motorola MTA) and the advanced settings and try changing the ports around a little there, also try and do something with the DMZ setting. But warning: if you tear down the Motorola MTA firewall with the DMZ setting there, you will never get it back! You will have to take one of your computers off of the NetGear and attach it directly to the Motorola MTA in order to 'uncheck' the DMZ box then go back and rebuild the NetGear firewall. Very messy. PAT] ------------------------------ From: VOIP News Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 12:05:05 -0400 Subject: Jeff Pulver Pulls Few Punches - VoIP Pioneer Juggles Businesses Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2004/0604/06j.htm By Jeff Baumgartner, Editor Jeff Pulver's name has almost become synonymous with the VoIP movement. Whenever there's a major IP voice regulatory issue on the board, you can bet that he's right in the thick of it, protecting the interests of the small guy as well as his budding VoIP company, Free World Dialup (FWD). But FWD is just one of his interests. In fact, it would be impossible to fit everything he's doing onto one business card. Pulver, who owns a piece of Vonage and is the co-founder of the VON Coalition, is re-launching an Internet-based progressive rock radio station, owns a record label and serves as chairman of WHP Wireless. He estimates that he has 20 to 30 companies running at any given time. CED Editor Jeff Baumgartner caught up with Pulver to see what's next and what's ahead for one of VoIP's most fervent voices. An edited transcript follows. Full story at: http://www.cedmagazine.com/ced/2004/0604/06j.htm 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/ ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. 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