29 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
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The Telecom Digest for April 19, 2011
Volume 30 : Issue 101 : "text" Format
====== 29 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ====== |
Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
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See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details
and the name of our lawyer, and other stuff of interest.
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Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 02:31:41 -0700
From: Sam Spade <sam@coldmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How To Fix 911
Message-ID: <SMmdnR7oIItjmTHQnZ2dnUVZ_qSdnZ2d@giganews.com>
Monty Solomon wrote:
> How To Fix 911
>
> By Christine Kenneally
> Saturday, Apr. 16, 2011
> Time
>
> The phone rang at 4:43 a.m. on March 27, 2007. Patty Michaels, a
> dispatcher at a 911 call center in Belleville, Ill., picked up. On
> the other end, a woman screamed for help. She said her husband had
> attacked her. Michaels heard a baby crying in the background. The
> caller's address appeared on Michaels' screen: it was in O'Fallon,
> Ill., less than 10 miles away. Michaels asked the woman to confirm
> it. "That's when it got really tricky," she says. The caller wasn't
> in Illinois. She was in South Korea.
>
> Two days earlier, the woman and her baby had left O'Fallon to join
> her husband, an Army serviceman posted in Seoul. She was locked in
> her bedroom, afraid for her life. But because the woman had dialed
> 911 from a VOIP - voice over Internet protocol - service, using a
> computer, Michaels had no way of finding her. The 911 system doesn't
> locate computers; it shows only the address that the phone service is
> registered to, and when Michaels' caller left the country, she didn't
> update her address.
>
> That small lapse underlies the fundamental problem of 911: it was
> developed for landlines back in the days when copper wires ran
> between a telephone and a central switch. But since 1968, when the
> first 911 call, a ceremonial test case, rang in Haleyville, Ala., the
> service has grown to cover 96% of the U.S. and now receives some 240
> million calls a year - less than half from landlines in many
> communities.
>
> Americans assume we can connect to 911 in all the ways we connect to
> each other. Our GPS-enabled smart phone, Google and Foursquare may
> know exactly where we are at any given time, but unfortunately, these
> technologies aren't compatible with standard 911. Traditional
> emergency services don't take texts, photos, Skype calls or videos
> either. Then there are social media like Twitter and Facebook, which
> work when our phones don't. After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami
> in Japan, millions of people communicated through social networks
> when landlines went down and mobile networks were overwhelmed. Within
> an hour of the earthquake, more than 1,200 tweets a minute were
> coming from Tokyo, including video updates on the scene. But a system
> like 911 - the first first responder - is out of the loop.
>
> ...
>
> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062452,00.html
>
1. Someone who would move a Voip adapter needs to understand the
technology at a end-user basic functional level.
2. The fact that wireline service was down in Japan proves only that
wireline service can be disrupted in a major disaster.
3. Mobile 911, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, can be useful in
certain circumstances, but for residential use there is nothing that
approaches the safety and robustness of "old fashioned" wireline E911
service.
Date: 18 Apr 2011 01:01:43 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?
Message-ID: <20110418010143.40020.qmail@joyce.lan>
<ernest.donlin@gmail.com> wrote:
> John Levine wrote:
>> Based on what I've seen, any risk of cancer is swamped by the risk
>> of stepping into the street without looking while you're talking on
>> the phone and being hit by a bus. ...
>I never smoked, and I don't think I should have just because there
>were other risks to watch out for. It cuts both ways, doesn't it?
But unlike your examples, they're both (ear cancer and bus strikes)
consequences of mobile phone use. Stop using the phone and they both
go away.
I realize that if people were sensible, they would not talk on the
phone while attempting to steer (whether a car or one's own feet), but
if people were sensible, there's a whole lot of problems we wouldn't
have.
R's,
John
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 11:08:41 -0500
From: John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: The Tru SIM, anyone here used it?
Message-ID: <BANLkTi=fc+9cd9NK-q6xhGjsREp0uuJo1A@mail.gmail.com>
A quick search of the archives shows we haven't discussed this company
in nearly five years and at the time it was only a wifi/VOIP solution.
This company is offering a SIM card without the roaming charges. The
rates are a little steep. It's more expensive than using a local SIM
card from the country visited, but it's cheaper than using ones SIM
abroad. The subscriber will pay more, but it eliminates the need to
play musical chairs with SIM cards.
While it appears to work globally, the cheap rates are only valid in
US, UK, and Australia with more countries coming soon. If they could
cover all of Europe I think this would be good for someone continually
hopping across borders.
Site: http://www.truphone.com/en-US/Products/Tru-SIM/
--
John Mayson <john@mayson.us>
Austin, Texas, USA
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 22:58:42 -0400
From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Where does 411.com get it's updates?
Message-ID: <4DACFA62.6020705@horne.net>
I looked up my optometrist in 411.com today, but it showed the wrong
number: the listing was for another optical shop that she hasn't worked
at in years.
Where does 411.com get its updates from? Is there an update process that
covers all or most of the directory sites? I'd like to help my OD fix
her listing, but I don't want to tell her to update ten sites if I can
point her to one.
Bill
(Filter QRM for direct replies)
--
"Now Smackwater Jack he bought a shotgun
'cause he was in the mood for a little confrontation"
- Carole King
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 05:23:01 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Where does 411.com get it's updates?
Message-ID: <ioj67l$jui$1@news.albasani.net>
Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> wrote:
>I looked up my optometrist in 411.com today, but it showed the wrong
>number: the listing was for another optical shop that she hasn't worked
>at in years.
>Where does 411.com get its updates from? Is there an update process that
>covers all or most of the directory sites? I'd like to help my OD fix
>her listing, but I don't want to tell her to update ten sites if I can
>point her to one.
411.com, address.com, and phonenumber.com are all whitepages.com. That
whitepages.com compiles some business listings is new within the last
year. They have a note that some business listings are from localeze.com
and that if that's the source, it's noted in the detailed listing, but
they don't tell you the source of other listings.
whitepages.com used to be pretty good when the lists they consolidated all
came from telephone directories but that hasn't been their business model
in a few years.
I wouldn't use the word "update" with these online databases. If they buy
a list, they add the information, and they have no interest in checking
if the information is out of date or never was correct. There's a difference
between list consolidation and a useful product.
Now, Intellius and Dun + Bradstreet, major brokers of business lists,
make an attempt to call each business telephone number in their database
once a year (so they claim), although I doubt they reach them all that often.
If they do encounter bad information, they remove it.
***** Moderator's Note *****
Thanks for the info. Is there an update process? In other words, how
can my eye doctor get her listing corrected?
Bill Horne
Moderator
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