Table of contents:

* 1 - Collect call from Rockford to Sycamore, Illinois in 1957 -
  Mark Thomas <sorabji@sorabji.com>
* 2 - FCC publishes biennial do-not-call report - "John Levine"
  <johnl@iecc.com>

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Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.2.00.1601092155460.24894@ks.sorabji.com>
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 2016 22:32:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Mark Thomas <sorabji@sorabji.com>
Subject: Collect call from Rockford to Sycamore, Illinois in 1957

Hi, folks. I have lurked at Telecom-Digest since ~1994. I run a web site
called The Payphone Project and keep an eye on this place for discussion
related to payphones and public communication, among other things.

The subject of payphones is dead to most but the inquiries I get could
make you understand how this seemingly moribund topic remains an
almost bottomless source of intrigue for me. Payphones played significant
roles in very specific incidents (think "Serial" and the so-called
"Mysterious Best Buy Payphone"). The seemingly obscure anthropoligical
need to prove that a payphone once existed at a certain spot is more
common than one might think.

Last month I was contacted by individuals working on a kidnap & murder
case from 1957. Thanks to cooperation from AT&T (imagine that) they had
already proved beyond reasonable doubt that in 1957 a payphone existed at
a certain spot in Rockford, Illinois. A collect call made from this
payphone has become central to establishing a timeline in which minutes,
even seconds matter.

I made countless collect calls back in the day but 1957 is before my time
and the scenario presented below is a little too specific for my area(s)
of expertise. That is why I am forwarding the question to Telecom-Digest.

The question, in a nutshell: Approximately how many minutes did it
take to make a collect call from Rockford, Illinois; to Sycamore, in
1957? The full inquiry follows:

 	In 1957, what would have been the steps needed to place a
 	collect call from Rockford to Sycamore?  Obviously it's an
 	operator assisted call, but would the caller first have to go
 	through a Bell System operator in Rockford, who would then
 	contact the DeKalb-Ogle operator in Sycamore?  Or was the caller
 	able to contact the DeKalb-Ogle operator directly?  Because there
 	were different phone systems in each area then.

 	We are trying to ascertain how many steps you would have to go
 	through and approximately how long it would take before you were
 	actually speaking to the person you were calling.

Any retired Illinois telephone operators out there?

Thanks for reading. I have no stake in this matter, just passing it
along to those who would know better than me.

--
mt


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Message-ID: <20160109232842.39167.qmail@ary.lan>
Date: 9 Jan 2016 23:28:42 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
Subject: FCC publishes biennial do-not-call report

Every two years the FCC is required to report to the Congress on how
the DNC registry is doing.

It's doing great, over 222 million numbers registered.  Since
registrations no longer expire, they've done a fair amount to remove
numbers when they go out of service, with a digression about how you
tell a number that's been disconnected from one that's been ported.

They are painfully aware of how many crooks ignore the DNC rules and
how hard it's become to enforce with cheap global VoIP and the ability
for any random virtual PBX to inject call data that used to need a CO
switch and SS#7.

Find all about their "Zapping Rachel" contest, too.

https://www.ftc.gov

R's,
John


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End of telecom Digest Mon, 11 Jan 2016