From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Feb 19 15:38:13 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i1JKcCH13314; Thu, 19 Feb 2004 15:38:13 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 15:38:13 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200402192038.i1JKcCH13314@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 #81 TELECOM Digest Thu, 19 Feb 2004 15:38:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 81 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" (Tony P.) Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" (Chris Kantarjiev) Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" (email@crazyhat.net) Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" (Joey Lindstrom) Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" (McWebber) Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" (Kyler Laird) Re: The Virus Underground (Nick Landsberg) Re: The Virus Underground (William Robison) Re: Cable Modem Hackers Conquer the Co-ax (David B. Horvath, CCP) Re: Cable Modem Hackers Conquer the Co-ax (Joey Lindstrom) Advice Needed For Modem Disconnecting Problem (L. Hao) Re: Experts Warn of Microsoft 'Monoculture' (William Robison) Re: Distractions While Driving - And Not Just Cell Phones (Steven Sobol) Re: Long Distance Wrong Numbers From Everywhere (Eric Friedebach) 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 is 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" Organization: ATCC Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 05:40:16 GMT In article , Kyler@news.Lairds.org says: > Phil Earnhardt writes: >> The end of the story changed topics: Qwest announced they would begin >> to offer DSL service on a line that doesn't have regular phone >> service: >> "Also Monday, Notebaert said Qwest will be launching later this month >> a separate DSL service, which he dubbed --'naked DSL.' Before, >> customers had to subscribe to Qwest's telephone service to get DSL. > Qwest is confused. It can't be done. J. Michael Healy > explained the technical details long > ago. > http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=vwrn2.866%24mv6.1345865%40news3.mia&output=gplain > Without dialtone, you don't have a connection in the C.O., no > connection -- no ADSL -- very simple. They are not going to provide > you with a free line to carry ADSL, neither will any other operating > company in the country. Not true. For example -- I have DSL on my line and I tried an experiment. I disconnect CO battery from my line and the DSL connection was fully functional without it. If you're on a DMS-100 and in Verizon New England territory dial 980 and flash the hook then hang up. That kills CO battery for 2 minutes. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No, Kyler, I think you are confused, > not Qworst. You don't have to have dialtone on a line, just battery. Not even battery. See above. I think the DSLAM provides the voltage necessary. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 22:24:09 -0800 (PST) From: Chris Kantarjiev Subject: Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" > Qwest is confused. It can't be done. Oh please. I have a pair dedicated to DSL, no dial tone, right now. I've had it for years. "A line for free"? Hardly. I pay handsomely for the privilege of using that copper pair. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 00:51:52 -0700 From: In message <> Kyler Laird did ramble: > Qwest is confused. It can't be done. J. Michael Healy > explained the technical details long > ago. > http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=vwrn2.866%24mv6.1345865%40news3.mia&output=gplain > Without dialtone, you don't have a connection in the C.O., no > connection -- no ADSL -- very simple. They are not going to provide > you with a free line to carry ADSL, neither will any other operating > company in the country. A swing and a miss. The line would be connected to the C.O., and the telco would still bill somebody (ISP, end user, whatever) for that pair. There is no reason a dialtone, phone number, or even power would need to be on the line (although if you want ADSL, you'd probably need regulated power.) ============ A well-dressed man walks into a bar and asks a woman to sleep with him for $1M. The woman is excited and she gives immediate consent: "Of course I'll sleep with you!". Then the man asks, "will you sleep with me for $5?". The woman indignantly replies, "Of course not! What do you think I am?". The man replies, "We've already established what you are; now we're merely haggling over the price." ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 06:56:20 -0700 From: Joey Lindstrom Reply-To: Joey Lindstrom Organization: Telus Sucks! Subject: Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" Wednesday, February 18, 2004, 10:25:16 PM, Kyler Laird wrote: > Qwest is confused. It can't be done. J. Michael Healy > explained the technical details > long ago. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=vwrn2.866%24mv6.1345865%40news3.mia&output=gplain > Without dialtone, you don't have a connection in the C.O., no > connection -- no ADSL -- very simple. They are not going to provide > you with a free line to carry ADSL, neither will any other operating > company in the country. > --kyler > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No, Kyler, I think you are confused, > not Qworst. You don't have to have dialtone on a line, just battery. > When I had my recorded message service running back in the 1970's > with several racks of the old intercept style machines from Illinois > Bell, the lines (25 or so of them) were *one way inbound* > only. There was no dial tone provided, but you could hear sidetone, > which is to say when you blew a bit of air into the mouthpiece, you > heard it out your earpiece. If a phone is totally 'dead' you won't > get that. I've seen other telephones similar, used as manual > intercoms. And Bell *does* get money for those arrangements; they > give nothing for free. I am sure what they do is provide a circuit > with no dial tone, tie it up across the central office to the > location where the ISP-like DSL office is located. They assign it a > non-dialable circuit number for billing purposes so that no one can > call into it either. PAT] As rare as it is for me to agree with our esteemed moderator :-), I must concur. When I got DSL service from Cadvision, a non-telco provider, they used a separate, otherwise-unused line pair. Indeed, my existing phone line was provided by Sprint Canada, a CLEC, but even if I'd had an ILEC line, Cadvision's setup in that area was to use a separate wire pair which was used ONLY for ADSL. Later, when I moved to a different area, they had different arrangements, and I had to have Telus (ILEC) dialtone on the line. But this requirement was imposed upon them by Telus, not by any technical requirements. Indeed, the CRTC (government agency) recently told Telus and all other ILEC's to stuff that idea - they *MUST* now allow DSL over "bare" lines or lines being used by CLEC's. As soon as my current ISP (Nucleus - Cadvision was swallowed up by Telus, but that's another horror story) tells me they're prepared to do this (provision my existing DSL over a CLEC line), I'm giving Telus the heave-ho. Again. Joey Lindstrom ------------------------------ From: McWebber Subject: Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 01:55:59 -0500 Kyler Laird wrote in message news:telecom23.79.3@telecom-digest.org: > Qwest is confused. It can't be done. J. Michael Healy > explained the technical details long > ago. http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=vwrn2.866%24mv6.1345865%40news3.mia&output=gplain > Without dialtone, you don't have a connection in the C.O., no > connection -- no ADSL -- very simple. They are not going to provide > you with a free line to carry ADSL, neither will any other operating > company in the country. > --kyler > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No, Kyler, I think you are confused, > not Qworst. They can do whatever they want with the copper coming into the CO. McWebber "Richter points to the lack of legal action against his company as proof that he's operating appropriately." Information Week, November 10, 2003 ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" From: Kyler Laird Organization: Insight Broadband Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 13:12:00 GMT Kyler Laird writes: > http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=vwrn2.866%24mv6.1345865%40news3.mia&output=gplain > Without dialtone, you don't have a connection in the C.O., no > connection -- no ADSL -- very simple. They are not going to provide > you with a free line to carry ADSL, neither will any other operating > company in the country. Ouch! What happened to the spacing here?! I just verified the sent message and it had this paragraph idented the same as the URL. The resulting indentation might lead someone with no sense of sarcasm who fails to look at the URL to think that *I* said/thought such a thing. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No, Kyler, I think you are confused, ... and there's the verification. --kyler ------------------------------ From: Nick Landsberg Subject: Re: The Virus Underground Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 05:53:58 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet Barry Margolin wrote: > In article , Geoffrey Welsh > wrote: >> That said, many readers here will recall that RTM's internet worm >> (does anyone have an authoritative pice to say whether it was the >> first or not?) ran on UNIX and exploited Sendmail vulnerabilities; >> IIRC, Microsoft did not have an internet-capable platform at the time. > Times were different. That happened before the Internet was opened up > to anyone willing to pay $10/month for access. Those of us who were > on the Internet were a relatively benign community, and we mostly > trusted each other. Few organizations bothered with firewalls at the > time (if you did want one, you had to construct it yourself -- there > weren't any off-the-shelf products yet). The sendmail vulnerability > was quite blatant: you connected to the SMTP port and typed something > like "DBUG", and you could then send arbitrary commands that would be > executed by the root-owned server process. It was like a small town > where everyone feels safe leaving their doors unlocked. Yes, times were very different, Barry. I just happened to be working as a consultant for a company making proposals on government military contracts then, using Unix servers. I had just finished porting TCP/IP to their SMP box and had just started on a design for providing "Orange Book" security when the Morris worm hit. As I recall, it wasn't the "DBUG" command that did it, it was a buffer overflow (does that sound familiar, don't we ever learn?) that caused a portion of memory to be overwritten with a very carefully crafted piece of machine code which then went and fetched the rest of the worm. (My memory could be faulty on this last variation.) Because this was binary code, it would only work on specific one specific Unix variant which was most prevalent at the time, 4.3 BSD I think. (Does this also sound familiar? Pick the most prevalent OS to go out after?) The worm itself did tricks to prevent decompilation (dis-assembly) which most hackers today would not even think of. (I won't mention them so as not to give any hackers out there ideas.) It was Gene Spafford of Purdue who was instrumental in finding out what it did and how it did it, although I presume many others were also involved. Oddly enough, or maybe not oddly, the Morris worm did no damage that I can recall, other than to spawn clones of itself, tie up bandwidth on the net and eat up CPU cycles on the infected machines. If only such were the case today. As you said Barry, the internet was a very trusting community in those days, and the Morris worm should have been a wake-up call to us all. > But the landscape has changed since then. The commercialization of > the Internet has opened it up to all segments of the community; we're > living in an inner city where there are lots of dangerous people we > need to watch out for. > Microsoft had the opportunity to learn from our early experiences, but > did they really take advantage of it? It seems not, since allowing > the mail reader to execute active code in messages is not much > different from the sendmail vulnerability that we plugged 15 years > ago. To extend my analogy, Windows seems like a suburbanite driving > into a ghetto and leaving his sports car unlocked and unattended; we > shouldn't be surprised if it gets stripped or taken for a joy-ride. > Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu > Arlington, MA "It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious" - A. Bloch [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had forgotten all about that Morris Worm thing until it was brought up here. I do remember I was speaking on the phone at that moment to jsol when he told me he could not talk anymore at that time, he and others were trying to stop the Morris Worm before it did any further damage. Some others at MIT at the time were also quite concerned about it, as was spaff. The internet was quite a different place back then. PAT] ------------------------------ From: William Robison Subject: Re: The Virus Underground Organization: The University of Iowa, Department of Physics and Astronomy Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 15:40:21 GMT Much text deleted for clarity [Authors Note: Well, I finally got tired (pissed actually) at running on Windows, it simply crashes too much, so I switched from Netscape 4.x on Windows to Netscape 7.x on Solaris. Much faster, cut & paste works right (it's a UNIX thing)] Geoffrey Welsh wrote: > William Robison wrote: >> Are we all asking the wrong question about virus software? >> Why do we all keep using IE and Outlook? (kinda like hitting your >> thumb with a hammer, over and over). > That's like asking why we use the tires that come with our cars when > there are so many better ones available. They're there and they work. > Even if the replacements were free, not everyone is going to be aware > of the advantages of the alternatives and not everyone who is aware is > going to choose to invest the time and effort. But the OEM tires look like they came from the scrap yard, off of a 15 year old car with 125,000 miles on it (2nds. set of tires). And when you take it to the shop to get the hole patched (the day after you bought it) the mechanic tells you about the other dozen patches already applied to the tire. (If any car manufacturer casually disregarded something as simple as a taillamp that failed within a few weeks on every car sold, they wouldn't be in business for long) >> How many times do we have to be explotied before we realize >> there has to be a better way (and there are, certainly, many >> alternatives to IE/Outlook). > Users have developed a comfort level with Microsoft OSes and > applications; they are what everyone supports and talks. Even if a > user is aware that they have been compromised (it's amazing how many > computer users cannot grasp the simplest principles of operation, let > alone notice when their computer is misbehaving) and they're aware of > the existence of alternatives, they may not feel comfortable wandering > away from the familiar. > The fact that Microsoft seems to be implying that their patch process > is a good enough solution doesn't help. I'm awed at how most people view their machines; as black boxes. I'm also amazed at how poor documentation is for most consumer computer hardware/software. How could you expect anyone to develop even a basic level of comprehension given to almost total lack of information that comes with a PC these days (and if you start to say on-line documentation, you simply don't get it!). I often fall back into memories of "how it was" back in "the good old days" (With out Univac 418's, processor schematics were supplied as part of the package, Source code to the operating system, enough documentation to generate the OS in a custom configuration (i.e. kernel make in the Unix world), documentation of the programming interface to the OS. Granted everything is much more complicated/powerful/LARGE these days. > That said, many readers here will recall that RTM's internet worm > (does anyone have an authoritative pice to say whether it was the > first or not?) ran on UNIX and exploited Sendmail vulnerabilities; > IIRC, Microsoft did not have an internet-capable platform at the time. I remember a worm that propogated over the DECnet networks prior to the RTM worm. The network was worldwide, with many thousands of nodes. DECnet, at that time, came configured is such a way to allow a remote system to save a program file (i.e. executable or a DCL script) on the local machine and then cause it to be executed. It couldn't access things at the level we see on todays PC's, but keep in mind that the processors of that day were probably equivalent to a 15Mhz Pentium (fifteen Megahertz, not 150), so using CPU cycles, even if you couldn't damage the file system, was a very noticeable impact (to many people, as it was a shared system). The fix was simple, was applied within a day or two everywhere, and with the next release of VMS/DECnet, the vulnerability was disabled by default (gee, what a novel idea!). Who was it that said: "We who fail to observe history are doomed to repeat it". (or is that: "We who fail to observe history are doomed to repeat it, over and over, and over and over, and...") Regards to all, -Willy ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 09:18:33 -0500 Subject: Re: Cable Modem Hackers Conquer the Co-ax From: David B. Horvath, CCP
Reply-To: newsgroup PAT - please, no email address, too much SPAM. Name is just fine! On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 19:56:01 -0800, none@none.com wrote: > One of the things that has me concerned and hope others > is what was listed in the article. That cable modem traffic > is pinged or actually "Routed" off other cable modems, so that > traffic can be handled more effectively as a huge LAN > My questions is: > 1) Where is the security for traffic on this network? Through obscurity, the most common kind (unfortunately)! There is a standard DOCIS that is supposed to only allow data through to your PC that is addressed to your modem (supposed to prevent "sniffing"). > 2) Why has the cable modem services industry not taken a > lead to encrypt or block access of traffic not deemed > for a particular router off-limits, so that it can be > shared with another user??? Cable modem services are very much like Ethernet -- everyone on the same segment has all the data reaching the port on the back of their equipment (the modem in this case). It is up to that equipment to ignore all data not addressed to it. In theory, the company's router will prevent me from seeing your data if we are on different segments of the network. But if we are neighbors being fed off the same set of wires, the data is coming into my house. The big difference between the cable network and the phone network is that direct addressibility. With the phone, there is a set of wires that run from the phone company equipment to your house and only your house (yes, I know they have SLC's, but your signal is pulled off at that point and sent down wires only to your house). With cable, there is one wire that supplies a segment (one or more city blocks) and a splitter on the pole or pedestal that pulls the signal for your house. They can apply electrical signal filters at that point to prevent you from seeing HBO if you don't pay for it. In some cases filters allow you to see the signal. But those filters are stupid -- they know nothing about MAC or IP addresses. The data flows into each house and it is up to your equipment to determine what data should be seen by you. The older cable modems (and Ethernet cards on a regular network) can be placed in "promiscuous mode" where all data would be transfered to the CPU rather than only those packets addressed to the specific MAC address. Encryption is expensive, slows down the process, and makes it harder for the technicians to investigate problems -- that's why the companies don't implement it. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Although I do not know the > particulars of this, I do know that Mr. Mike Flood, the general > manager of Cable One, here in Independence told me 'that was all > taken care of recently' when I asked him 'what prevents everyone > on the cable from showing up in my Network Neighborhood, and the > other way around.' I am sorry to say I did not understand his > sort of technical explanation. Maybe some of you could explain it > to me in simple words. It could be that Cable One went to DOCIS standard modems that prevent promiscuous mode. I don't know if there are any cable modems out there smart enough to filter based on network port. - David ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 09:25:58 -0700 From: Joey Lindstrom Reply-To: Joey Lindstrom Organization: Telus Sucks! Subject: Re: Cable Modem Hackers Conquer the Co-ax Wednesday, February 18, 2004, 11:16:18 PM, editor wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Although I do not know the > particulars of this, I do know that Mr. Mike Flood, the general > manager of Cable One, here in Independence told me 'that was all > taken care of recently' when I asked him 'what prevents everyone on > the cable from showing up in my Network Neighborhood, and the other > way around.' I am sorry to say I did not understand his sort of > technical explanation. Maybe some of you could explain it to me in > simple words. Its not a problem with DSL, since everyone goes to the > central office on their own pair. But with a cable strung around, > what *does* prevent us from being each other's Neighbor for spy > purposes, etc. Anyone? PAT] Actually Pat, if you don't have any decent protection, then anybody in the world can browse your computer, simply by firing up Windows Explorer and typing in: \\1.2.3.4 (where 1.2.3.4 is your IP address) Without security, I'll get access to any shares you've got set up on that PC. Now, in your case, you've got two good, solid lines of defense. The first is your Linksys box, which will laugh off any such request from the outside world (unless you specifically program it to allow this sort of thing). The second is your ZoneAlarm installation, which again will stop any such request in its tracks. Point is, it doesn't matter whether you're on cable or DSL -- this will work, if the protections aren't in place. The only difference with cable (and as you've noted, most cable operators have fixed this) is that your unprotected system might BROADCAST what it's sharing to your neighbours, who otherwise would not have known you were even there. They open up Network Neighborhood one day and say "hey, what's this PATTOWNSON workgroup? where'd that come from?" -- they didn't go looking for you, as in my above example, your information came to them, unbidden. As you say, that just wasn't likely to happen with DSL but even there, depending on the layout and how the ISP's routers are configured, it's not out of the question that it COULD happen with DSL. As always, practice safe computing. Wear a condom (ZoneAlarm), keep your car doors locked (Linksys router/firewall), and be careful which neighbourhoods you drive around in. Above all, never take candy from strangers (or open unsolicited file attachments). Joey Lindstrom ------------------------------ From: L. Hao Subject: Advice Needed For Modem Disconnecting Problem Organization: Comcast Online Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 06:23:00 GMT Hi, I am in the middle of integrating a third party vendor's modem server into our product, which functions as a modem server. The server modem's codec software runs in a TI C5409 DSP. And the server runs NT4.0. We are experiencing disconnecting problems. After we connect a USR V.90 client modem to the server modem and start downloading files from internet to the client machine, we would get disconnect shortly after the starting of the downloading. And we found the reason for the disconnect was in the server side. And it was due to a DTR CLEAR IOCTL call issued from user mode level to the modem driver. The driver then turns around and disconnect the server modem in the DSP. Can anyone with experience let me know how to approach this problem? Not an expert in the modem arena, I am at lost in tracing down this DTR CLR. What I want to do is to find out why the DTR CLEAR is issued and who issues it. I have a hunch that it was triggered by something that the modem sent, but our vendor insisted that they are doing everything right. So please help me! Thanks in advance. Lee ------------------------------ From: William Robison Subject: Re: Experts Warn of Microsoft 'Monoculture' Organization: The University of Iowa, Department of Physics and Astronomy Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 15:43:35 GMT Geoffrey Welsh wrote: > email@crazyhat.net wrote: >> Yeah, we'd all get a $5 coupon for our next purchase of a Microsoft >> service pack (which they'd start charging for to cover the cost of the >> lawsuit) > Many times I've seen companies charge for firmware upgrades that > customers want because of new features, but give the firmware upgrades > away free if they were needed to fix a bug. I'd love to see a law > that requires software publishers to provide customers with a freee > upgrade if that's what's required to fix a serious bug or plug a > vulnerability. > It would definitely revolutionize the software industry - or at least > split it into two groups that even executives could tell apart: those > who stand by their products and those who are required to state on the > package and in all advertising and catalog listings that their product > should not be relied upon. > It scares the crap out of me the way that big companies put big bucks > on the line using off the shelf software with histories of big bugs > and no one -- CIO, CFO, CEO, whoever -- ever stops to ask, "what if that > software screwed up and the aftermath cost us a hundred million > dollars?" Geoff: Can I add my "over and over, and over and over..." at the end of that? :-) -Willy ------------------------------ From: Steven J Sobol Subject: Re: Distractions While Driving -- And Not Just Cell Phones Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:48:55 -0600 Carl Moore wrote: > earlier on Interstate 81) that it is illegal in NY state to use a > handheld phone while driving (I don't have it in front of me what > emergency exception might exist). But I occasionally saw drivers > using handheld phones anyway in NY state. It's illegal to use a cell phone without handsfree in NYS, if I recall correctly. But only without a handsfree - with handsfree it's still legal. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, Apple Valley, CA Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP: C57E 8B25 F994 D6D0 5F6B B961 EA08 9410 E3AE 35ED ------------------------------ From: friedebach@yahoo.com (Eric Friedebach) Subject: Re: Long Distance Wrong Numbers From Everywhere Date: 19 Feb 2004 09:43:08 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Nick Landsberg wrote in message news:: > Patrick basically got it right, but, for those who may not now how 800 > service works: > There is conceptually "no such thing" as an 800 number (or 888, 877, > 866). Switches are programmed to make a "dip" into a network database > when they see these prefixes. > In the network database is a "routing table" which matches on dialed > number, originating NPA-NXX, and time of day, among other things, to > look up the actual "POTS" line to which to route the call. No part of > the POTS number need match any digits of the 800 number. > Thus, dialing 866-222-3333 from 973 may get you Joe's Pizza in Madison > NJ while dialing the same number from 937 (Southern Ohio) may get you > Horst's Hofbrau Haus in Cincinatti. > Since David did get the calls from all over the country, this is not > the case and it is probably a "global" routing, meaning route to the > same number whatever the originating NPA. > The other variation is time of day, which can be programmed in 15 > minutes intervals. For example, between 8 AM and 11 AM Eastern Time, > route all calls to a call center in the eastern time zone. 11 AM to 1 > PM, route them 50% each to numbers in the eastern and central > time-zones, etc., etc. Large companies with multiple "call-centers" > use this feature. > If these calls are happening at a particular time of day, then only a > portion of the routing table is messed up. > Nick L. I had the same issue, but in reverse in the late 90's. While out of town, I called my girlfriend at an 800 number ported to the home number late one evening. Quite a surprise when I woke up a guy in New York! A calling card call to the home number reached the right destination. The next day I tried calling the 800 number from a COCOT; same thing. I explained who I was and asked if they had an 800 number. Same RESPORG and everything. I was told there was a problem with the switch, and since I never saw a billing statement that was way out of line, I let it go at that. At the time I was told there was a problem with the switch in NYC. Eric Friedebach /Mortgage your Viagra!/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I am reminded of the time I became the switchboard/credit/customer service/complaint department for Sears Roebuck for a day against my will. It was 1975, Illinois Bell was busy converting central offices to ESS throughout Chicago. The downtown area had been cut over a year earlier; the downtown area also had the oldest, most crappy c.o.'s at the time. I went into my office one day and the phone was ringing. At the time I had the phone number 312-WEbster-9-4600, in other words 939-4600. Two blocks away was the State Street (downtown) Sears store. Their switch- board number was WABash 2-4600, in other words 922-4600. The difference between me and Sears was they had a five-position cord board with as many operators which rocked around the clock quite literally; they had five switchboard operators all day and evening; a couple operators overnight for the credit office stuff. Sears had their entire Chicago Region credit office on the fifth floor of that particular store. I on the other hand had a single line instrument. The phone was ringing, one call after another, and another, and another, and another, never stopping ringing; hang up and it would *instantly* ring again, always with calls for Sears, one department or another, sometimes hardware, sometimes clothes, sometimes credit, you name it. It appeared Illinois Bell had taken a large funnel with a big end and a little tiny spout on the other end and poured in all the calls for Sears, the spout dumping on my end. Sears, of course, never even missed the calls at all. After talking briefly to a few of the callers, I discovered they were all in the Chicago-Beverley phone exchange, a far southwest side exchange around 95th and Western Avenue with several prefixes, including BEverley 235 and several others wired out of that central office. By just hanging up the phone a couple times after it had rang, and tapping the hook quickly I was able to regain control of my phone, which would otherwise ring (with still another call for Sears if I had stayed on hook for more than maybe five or ten seconds. When I was able to get through to 611 (the old repair service number) I was fortunate enough to reach this wise old man working there who was able to identify the problem immediatly after I described it. It seems Beverley had been 'cut' the night before to ESS, and "someone got their translations and their tables incorrect," he explained to me. "I will call over there right now and tell them to look at it and fix it. Its not just you with 4600 who is getting hassled, but whoever has 939-4321 is getting hassled with a million calls for Western Union on 922-4321, and imagine whoever has 939-9500, 'across from the Grand Central train station on 922-9500.' Give me about five or ten minutes to get those calls stopped." About ten minutes later, as he promised, my phone quit ringing with calls for Sears. He called back in maybe fifteen minutes and told me that "somehow they got 922 mixed up with 939". In those days of no area code/prefix crunch and wide open spaces between each category, apparently 939 was 'next in line' after 922 in Chicago. He was quite apologetic about it and I thanked him courteously for correcting it. Those were the days when Illinois Bell/Ameritech/Southwestern Bell/ SBC employees *actually cared* about the public they served, and automatically assumed a call from a subscriber was the purpose of their work and not an interupption to it. They did not treat the public like 'crank callers and complainers' like they do now many times. PAT] ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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