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The Telecom Digest for October 21, 2011
Volume 30 : Issue 267 : "text" Format
====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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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
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Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 01:44:44 -0700
From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Motorola revives Razr brand to take on iPhone 4S
Message-ID: <4E9E8DFC.6090704@thadlabs.com>
On c|net late Monday (18-OCT-2011) afternoon:
Motorola's ultrathin Droid Razr may be just the device to take on
Apple's latest iPhone 4S. Motorola today took the wraps off the new
Droid Razr, the thinnest smartphone ever made, in a move that revives
what some would call an iconic brand, the Razr. Motorola's Razr,
introduced in 2004, was the hottest-selling cell phone for years. It's
super-thin design was the envy of industry and helped push Motorola to
a top spot in the world cell phone market.
The company is hoping to strike gold once again with the brand and
with the innovative thin design.
"Our mission was to create a true object of desire, incredibly thin,
that delivers features without compromise," Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha
said during the presentation here introducing the new Droid Razr.
Indeed, not only has Motorola built a thin and light smartphone with a
width of only 7.1 millimeters and a weight of 4.48 ounces, but the
company has also managed to pack in fast 4G LTE network technology and
a larger high resolution screen.
[...]
And of course this light and thin phone also supports Verizon's 4G LTE
technology, something that Apple's CEO Tim Cook said would have
"forced too many design compromises" to be included in the Apple
iPhone just yet.
[...]
Full article and 15 pictures of the Droid RAZR here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20122213-266/motorola-revives-razr-brand-to-take-on-iphone-4s/
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 08:02:51 -0400
From: Fred Goldstein <SeeSigForEmail@wn6.wn.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Congress asks for technical reports about LightSquared and GPS
Message-ID: <20111020120311.2ED48347EA@mailout.easydns.com>
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:06:55 -0400, Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> wrote,
>Congress has asked various federal agencies for copies of reports they
>submitted to the FCC concerning possible interference by
>LightSquared's network to the GPS system, but the reports aren't
>forthcoming.
>
>Where there's smoke ...
>
>
>http://science.house.gov/press-release/transparency-needed-evaluate-gps-interference
>
there's politics. These teabagger House committees are utterly
frustrated at the lack of serious corruption in the Obama
administration. So they make stuff up. Darrell Issa promised to
spend his term essentially harassing the administration with
investigations, justified or not.
Plus you have AT&T and Verizon, BIG Banana Republican donors, looking
to get rid of the spectre of a wholesale wireless provider to compete
with them. If they can knock off T-Mobile, they're down to three
carriers, which is a pretty manageable cartel.
Read the FCC material, not political grandstanding.
--
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting
http://www.ionary.com/
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:56:19 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: BlackBerry Outage Linked to Massive Drop in Traffic Accidents
Message-ID: <p062408becac61f26dae9@[10.0.1.9]>
BlackBerry Outage Linked to Massive Drop in Traffic Crashes
by Brad Aaron
October 17, 2011
According to data released last week by NYPD, distracted drivers were
the leading cause of city traffic crashes in August. Of 16,784
incidents, 1,877 were attributed to "driver inattention/distraction,"
while an additional 10 were linked specifically to phones or other
electronic devices.
While NYPD reports make it impossible to decipher exactly how many
city drivers are texting or talking before a crash - we'll go out on
a limb and assume it was more than 10 - the recent BlackBerry service
outage in Europe, Africa and the Middle East served to illustrate the
extent of the problem in two cities. The National reports:
...
http://www.streetsblog.org/2011/10/17/blackberry-outage-linked-to-massive-drop-in-traffic-crashes/
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:01:26 -0400
From: Mark J. Cuccia <markjcuccia.remove-this@and-this-too.yahoo.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: California PUC Approves 669 Overlay to 408 San Jose CA Metro Area
Message-ID: <E1RH4QI-0008La-6E@telecom.csail.mit.edu>
Today, Thursday 20-October-2011, the California Public Utilities
Commission (re)approved the telco industry's (re)submitted petition
for an overlay to the 408 area code region in the San Jose CA Metro
area. The new overlay NPA code is 669.
The docket number for the 2011 re-submission is A.11-06-008.
Various URLs/References at the CA-PUC website include:
The "Area Code 408 Relief" information page (English and Spanish):
(English)
http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/generalInfo/Area+Codes/408+Area+Code.htm
(Spanish)
http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/PUC/Telco/generalInfo/Area+Codes/408+en+espanol.htm
The 20-October-2011 Press Release itself (htm, doc, pdf versions):
http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PUBLISHED/NEWS_RELEASE/145822.htm
http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/word_pdf/NEWS_RELEASE/145822.doc
http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/word_pdf/NEWS_RELEASE/145822.pdf
The main page for the A.11-06-008 docket itself, with links to
documents, decisions, the application itself, and so forth, is:
http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/published/proceedings/A1106008.htm
The 669 area code WAS originally intended to overlay 408 over ten
years ago, around 1999/2000, but implementation of the overlay at
that time was subsequently "suspended" by the California PUC pending
further studies regarding area code exhaust and stricter numbering
and code conservation measures being developed by the industry and
regulatory, i.e., thousands-block assignments within NXX c.o.codes.
The ORIGINALLY intended implementation dates for the 408/669 NPA
overlay WERE as follows:
[1+]ten-digit dialing (officially) permissive
on Friday 01-January-1999
[1+]ten-digit dialing MANDATORY
on Friday 01-October-1999
Permissive intra-408 [1+]ten-digit dialing was probably in place
several years prior to 1999, however.
But the California PUC "temporarily" halted further implementation of
the 408/669 overlay (i.e., mandatory [1+]ten-digit intra-408 dialing),
prior to the October 1999 date. And it later formally halted (until
further notice), all "pending" overlays for the state (all of them
had been previously approved by the CA-PUC).
I don't know if (at the time) Lockheed-Martin-IMS-CIS-NANPA ever
announced a date when ILECs/CLECs/WSPs could begin requesting new
669-NXX c.o.codes, but the "effective" date of such would have been on
Saturday 01-January-2000, the official "effective" date for the new
669 overlay NPA.
And there doesn't seem to have been any such "POTS" 669-NXX codes
actually assigned by NANPA, although "special" 669-NXX c.o.codes did
have an "effective" date put into the TRA/etc. databases at that time,
such as 669-555, the 669-777 code for the test-number, Pacific Bell's
NXX codes under the 669 NPA for time-of-day, high-volume mass calling,
etc.
The test-number was to have been 669-777-0669, the 669-777 code
working out of Pacific Bell's SNJSCA11DS0, a Lucent-WECO 5ESS
associated with the San Jose: North-DA ratecenter. The effective
date was to have been Saturday 20-November-1999, and the disconnect
date would have been. Saturday 20-May-2000. I don't think that
Pacific Bell ever started up a test-announcement on 669-777-0669,
however some IXC/LD-carriers did open up 669-777 in their routings/
translations as a "valid" NPA-NXX code. I can remember going to a
Pacific Bell "vacant code recording" when dialing 669-777-xxxx
(including -0669) via AT&T-LL, MCI, (US)Sprint, and other IXCs.
LM-IMS-CIS-NANPA (Lockheed-Martin) did issue Planning Letter #149,
dated 25-January-1999, announcing the 408/669 overlay in 1999/2000.
(NANPA, the North American Numbering Plan Administration was AT&T
until 1984 divestiture, then it was turned over to the new and spun
out of the old Bell System "Bellcore" entity. Lockheed-Martin took
over the NANPA function with January 1998, a little over a year before
Bellcore was renamed Telcordia. In January 2000, LM turned over NANPA
to Warburg-Pincus' as "NeuStar".)
A subsequent "generic" PL-206 was issued on 14-January-2000 (a year
later) announcing that ALL pending California overlays had been
(temporarily) halted by the CA-PUC, until further notice.
There were NO new area codes implemented for California, neither
pending splits nor pending overlays, following the 619/858 split for
the northern San Diego CA suburbs in Summer/Fall 1999, until the
909/951 split in the San Bernardino/Riverside area during Summer/Fall
2004.
And then later new NPAs in California starting in 2006, were overlays,
most of them having been previously "halted" overlays, and a couple
of previously "halted" splits which were changed to overlays.
NeuStar-NANPA and the telco industry are re-submitting to the CA-PUC,
requests for overlays, one-by-one "as needed", and reactivation of the
408/669 overlay relief is one of them.
And the industry (through NeuStar-NANPA) has (re)submitted the request
to overlay 408 with 669, to the California PUC; the CA-PUC has
(re)approved NANPA's filing for a 408/669 overlay, today Thursday
20-October-2011, the 408/669 overlay having been "on hold" since
1999/2000 when it was originally planned to take effect.
Implementation dates "this time around" are still to be determined by
the telco industry with approval from the CA-PUC, and announced by
NeuStar-NANPA and the CA-PUC, in a forthcoming NANPA Planning Letter
to be issued possibly during the next several weeks.
A "formal" six-month period of permissive [1+]ten-digit dialing
alongside existing seven-digit dialing within 408 will take place,
and then mandatory [1+]ten-digit dialing will take place about a
month before the first new (pre)assigned (POTS) 669-NXX codes could
first begin to take effect. Note that such permissive intra-408
[1+]ten-digit dialing has been in effect throughout most-if-not-all
of California for probably twenty years now (and maybe even longer in
some places), but there will still be a "formal, announced" period of
permissive [1+]ten-digit dialing alongside existing seven-digit
dialing prior to the actual overlay.
It is LIKELY (though not yet formally determined) that the effective
date of potential new 669-NXX c.o.codes could be in November 2012
(a year from now), with mandatory [1+]ten-digit intra-408 dialing
being at some point in October 2012.
The test-number this time is likely to be 669-669-1669, which is the
format that at&t-ILEC has mostly been using for area code test-numbers
which they provide in their ILEC territory. Pacific Bell was taken
over by SBC in the late 1990s, and in 2005, SBC bought AT&T-LL/etc.,
and renamed everything as "at&t".
I don't know for certain which switch/CLLI is going to provide the
test-number this time, but I assume that it will still be provided
out of at&t/SBC/Pacific Bell's SNJSCA11DS0 Lucent-WECO 5ESS,
associated with the San Jose: North-DA ratecenter, which is the switch
that provided the test-number on the first attempt to implement the
overlay ten-plus years ago.
The 408/669 NPA region includes eleven (11) ratecenters, all are
within at&t/SBC/Pacific Bell's LATA #722 "San Francisco CA Metro",
and are associated with the following landline incumbent telcos.
(NOTE that there ARE some wireless 408-NXX codes in the Monterey LATA
which did NOT change/split to NPA 831 in 1998)
(there are also six at&t/SBC/Pacific*Bell ratecenters of the
San Francisco/etc CA LATA #722 in the 831 NPA to the south;
AND ratecenters in LATA #722 of Pacific*Bell (and GTE, GTE/Contel,
Frontier/Citizens) in NPAs: 415/(628), 510/(341), 650/(764), 925, 707)
(9740) at&t/sbc/Pacific*Bell (07 ratecenters)
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Campbell
San Jose: North DA (includes Milpitas)
San Jose: South DA
San Jose: West DA (includes: Cupertino, Santa Clara City)
San Martin
Saratoga
Sunnyvale
(2319) VeriZon/GTE (02 ratecenters)
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Los Gatos
Morgan Hill
(4420) VeriZon/GTE/Contel (01 ratecenter)
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Gilroy
(2315) Frontier/Global Valley Networks (01 ratecenter)
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
San Antonio CA
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
Mark J. Cuccia
markjcuccia at yahoo dot com
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