---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <20180811002910.GA5651@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2018 20:29:10 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: Reining in UN's little known International Telecommunication Union BY Michael O'Rielly, Opinion Contributor The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a relatively obscure but important appendage of the United Nations, is troubled. ITU faces several significant problems that keep it from excelling at its primary, but not sole, responsibility: global radio spectrum harmonization. So what can be done to correct course and allow the organization to remain viable for the future? http://thehill.com/opinion/technology/400990-reigning-in-uns-little-known-international-telecommunication-union -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly) ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20180811190847.GA8480@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2018 15:08:47 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: I'm looking for information about "Fight For The Future" I've been getting emails from an organization called "Fight For The Future," for a while now, and I'd like to know if anyone reading this knows who funds them and what their agenda is. FFTF appears to be trying to prevent the FCC rule change which revokes Net Neutrality from taking effect. Their arguments, although hyperbolic, appear well-intentioned, but out of an abundance of caution, I'd like to know who their backers are. The latest email I got is at <http://telecom-digest.org/fftf.html>. Thanks for your help! Bill -- Bill Horne Moderator ------------------------------ Message-ID: <959ce13a-0266-4c6a-1ded-2bf26935907e@ieee.org> Date: 6 Aug 2018 20:16:49 -0400 From: "Eric Tappert" <tappert@ieee.org> Subject: Backup Power for COs Folks, some history on backup power seems to be in order here. Originally telephones had internal batteries, either Dry Cells or Lead Acid batteries. The later gave rise to the phase "high and dry" as these sets also had an on/off switch ("high" was on, "low" was off) and the lead acid battery was either good ("wet") or discharged ("dry"). Thus if you were "high and dry" your phone was on with a dead battery. Sort of like being up the creek without a paddle.... As you can imagine, service calls to replace the batteries were very common, especially since folks often forgot to turn off the switch (a problem fixed with the "hook switch", which also saved receiver cords by giving a convenient place to store the receiver...). The CO common battery was introduced as a cost reduction, saving lots of expensive service calls. As some (many?) customers didn't have electrical power yet, there was no real thought given to having the phone work in the case of a power failure. The transition saved the Bell System over a million dollars the first year (1893). When automation hit (Strowger's switch), the switch used electro- magnetic relays that worked great on the 48 volt battery, so the that's where the switch got its power. The same power scheme was followed for panel and crossbar switches. I would note that the Bell System didn't automate until the 1920's when their projection of the need for operators exceeded the birth rate of women (men weren't polite enough to be operators in those days...). Ma Bell did buy Automatic Electric Strowger switches for two or three decades even though Western Electric was also making them on a patent license. Over the years the Bell System standard for CO battery power converged to 8 hours of battery backup, a generator to back up the batteries with 24 hours of fuel in the day tank and a week's worth of fuel on site. Typically the basement of a CO building only held the cable vault and lots of batteries and rectifiers. Fast forward to subscriber loop carrier and subscriber loop multiplexers. These became common during the suburban building boom as a way to minimized the expense of additional CO buildings. Each cabinet contained a battery power supply, typically 2 - 24 hours depending on available standard battery sizes and the capacity of the unit and, since the loops were shorter, 24 volts instead of 48 (PBXs with battery backup also use 24 volt plants). Electronics came to the rescue with electronic switching. The early ESS systems used 48 volt battery plants, but with development of low cost DC-DC converters, plants of 130 - 140 volts(1) became common as the higher voltage reduced wiring costs and improved efficiency. The same 8 hour battery supply and backup generator standard remained. Cell phones came along and the power plant for cell sites looked a lot like the subscriber loop carrier/multiplexer. That was changed after hurricane Katrina. In the aftermath, cellular telephones in the disaster area ceased working, even if the cell site was undamaged, when the batteries discharged. Since first responders had started to depend on cellular communications, the issue was escalated. The FCC took action (which was vigorously opposed by all the telephone companies...) and passed a regulation that required 24 hours of backup power (not necessarily batteries...) at COs and 8 hours at remote sites (SLC/SLM, cell sites, etc.). The deadline for implementation was 2008. I've heard that Verizon added a propane tank and backup generator at their cell sites to supplement the batteries that already existed. AFAIK, fiber systems have minimal battery backup at the customer's location, although any telco equipment in the path back to the CO needs to adhere to the FCC rules. Interesting enough, battery backup for PBXs was always optional and rarely ordered. Where it was not installed, a loop start phone was used to provide service in the event of a local power failure, that is if anybody remembered which closet it was in.... In any event, that's how we got here... I might add that non-tariff services (like DSL) don't require backup power. In fact, I've observed my DSL going down in power failures affecting the CO (the phone still worked...). Eric Tappert ***** Moderator's Note ***** 1. The 130 volt plant was originally used for coin telephone control: negative 130 was "coin return" and positive 130 was "coin collect." There were separate batteries for it in the power room at most locations. The original "D1" bank used for the first T-Carrier installations had DC-to-DC power supplies for the repeaters in the manholes. In later years, the 130 volt battery plant was also use to power the repeaters, which required either a single 130 volt supply, or both positive and negative voltages, depending on the lengths of the spans. Bill Horne Moderator ------------------------------ Message-ID: <3CA405C5-41D7-4BEF-BF5A-1DC674C16E6E@remove-this.wb4aej.com> Date: 8 Aug 2018 08:10:42 -0700 From: "Fred Atkinson, WB4AEJ" <fred@remove-this.wb4aej.com> Subject: Re: Backup Power for Cox [or other] ISP [Telecom] > The 1960s and 1970s were tough time for both Bell and the independents. > > Below is a link to a discussion from January about payphone vandalism: > >https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.dcom.telecom/vandalism%7Csort:date/comp.dcom.telecom/Ep_q_jJscJg/n4vNANCJAAAJ > > IMHO, the excessive time and money phone companies had to spend to > repairing vandalism to its infrastructure and security (like two-man > crews) contributed to the service crises of the 1970s. When my father opened his Tennis club in the seventies, he set up a trailer behind the house for use as a pro shop. The phone company ran a five pair cable across the yard to the trailer from the house to install his business line in the trailer. He later built a fence enclosing the area between the house and the trailer. He let our family german shepherd (Heidi) run loose inside this fence. Several months later, the phone in the trailer stopped working. After trying another phone set in the trailer that also didn't work, he called the phone company. The repairman came out and determined that our german shepherd had dug up the five pair cable and then pulled it loose. He connected it back up and buried the cable with a shovel that I loaned him. I stood there as he called it in and told the repair agent that the dog had dug up the cable. After a few moments, he said, "Well, the dog didn't know what she was doing!". When I asked him about that, he told me he was asked if it was malicious. I broke up laughing! Brilliant question, don't you think? ------------------------------ Message-ID: <000001d4306e$7be889c0$73b99d40$@nc.rr.com> Date: 10 Aug 2018 01:53:35 -0400 From: "Bob Goudreau" <BobGoudreau@nc.rr.com> Subject: How many people in the NANP live in places that still have 7D dialing? The recent debate about splits vs. overlays has made we wonder what proportion of people in each NANP country live in places that still allow local calls to be dialed without specifying an area code. Resources such as http://www.lincmad.com/areacodemap.html provide wonderful ways to see where non-overlay NPAs are located, but does anyone have population figures broken down on an NPA-by-NPA basis? Actually, we do know the answer for most NPA countries: Jamaica and the Dominican Republic are both completely overlaid, so presumably 100 percent of their populations must dial with 10D or 1+10D. Conversely, none of the remaining island members of the NANP have more than one NPA each, so they probably all still support 7D dialing. Canada is now almost completely overlaid. As far as I can see, the only remaining Canadian NPAs without a current or planned overlay are 807 in northwestern Ontario and 867 spanning the three territories. Both of those regions are sparsely populated, so close to 100 percent of Canadians will live in non-7D areas by 2024 (by which time the overlays planned for NPAs 506 and 709 will be active). The leaves the US. There are plenty of overlays, but also lots of remaining singleton area codes. There is no obvious pattern: some very populous cities (e.g., Detroit and Jacksonville) remain un-overlaid, along with predominantly rural or tiny single-NPA states such as Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, Montana, both Dakotas, Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Conversely, although most major metropolitan areas now have overlays, there are also plenty of rural overlay examples, such as western Kentucky, northern Wisconsin and the entire states of Idaho and West Virginia. The driving factor is when an older NPA happened to require relief; no geographic splits have occurred in the past decade, meaning that all relief NPAs introduced since then have been overlays. In the decade or so prior to the last geographic split (575 splitting from New Mexico's 505 in 2007), many new area codes were introduced, and different state preferences dictated which form of relief (split or overlay) was used. For instance, California's PUC was slower to embrace overlays than many other states, which is why there are still so many singleton NPAs (some of them geographically quite tiny) in the Golden State. So can anyone hazard an estimate about what fraction of the US population still has the ability to dial 7D calls? Bob Goudreau Cary, NC (in the 919/984 overlay) ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Sun, 12 Aug 2018