---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <4ED0C68E-6FD6-4182-999D-1D7040EB857F@roscom.com> Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:31:04 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: AT&T is raising the price of grandfathered unlimited plans again Another $5 increase brings the total cost to $40 a month by Nick Statt AT&T's grandfathered unlimited plans are vestiges of an earlier era, when unfettered access to mobile data was a perk offered to those willing to buy into the smartphone before it became ubiquitous. Now, those plans are getting costlier - again. AT&T has just announced a $5 increase on its grandfathered unlimited plans, bringing the total cost per month to $40, according to a report from DSLReports yesterday and confirmed by ArsTechnica today. That follows a $5 increase back in February of 2016, meaning those plans have jumped more than 30 percent in a little under one year. http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/10/14231764/att-grandfathered-unlimited-data-plans-price-increase ------------------------------ Message-ID: <936eecb3-ac79-4980-85af-4a768efb7b38@googlegroups.com> Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2017 19:10:45 -0800 (PST) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> Subject: History - Sixty Years ago Here are some of the telecommunications innovations of sixty years ago: 1957. 1) Community Dial Offices: An economical small size step-by-step unattended office for very small communities was developed in 1939 (type 355A). In 1957, upgrades continued, and there were 3,500 offices serving four million lines. 2) Direct Distance Dialing: Upgrades for Panel and No. 1 Crossbar were developed with axuillary senders to allow those subscribers to dial long distance calls. 3) Centrex: A Bell committee determined that direct inward dialing, coupled with identified outward dialing, would be a powerful tool for business. 4) At Western Union, fax transmission and private teletype networks continued to expand. Local offices were modernized with fluorescent lighting, air conditioning, and a more customer- friendly appearance. A national advertising campaign, "It's Wise to Wire" was initiated. 5) Research on transistors continued in many industries. Engineers studied different types, (i.e. "point contact", "junction"), and worked to develop ways to manufacture reliable transistors in quantity economically. ------------------------------ Message-ID: <201522B1-00F8-4D50-8EE9-001A87251480@roscom.com> Date: Sun, 8 Jan 2017 16:13:28 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: NYC to Collect GPS Data on Car Service Passengers NYC to Collect GPS Data on Car Service Passengers - Good Intentions Gone Awry or Something Else? By Joel Reidenberg During the holiday season, New York City through its Taxi & Limousine Commission (the "TLC") proposed a new rule expanding data reporting obligations for car service platform companies including Uber and Lyft. If the rule is adopted, car services will now have to report the GPS coordinates of both passenger pick-up and drop-off locations to the city government. Under NY's Freedom of Information Law, that data in bulk will also be subject to full public release. This proposal is either a classic case of good intentions gone awry or a clandestine effort to track millions of car service riders while riding roughshod over passenger privacy. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/01/04/nyc-to-collect-gps-data-on-car-service-passengers-good-intentions-gone-awry-or-something-else/ ------------------------------ Message-ID: <3598b17f-09a2-49b9-bd4f-86b7e3f2dcf3@googlegroups.com> Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2017 13:57:13 -0800 (PST) From: jhhaynes@earthlink.net Subject: Re: Telex and TWX History Concerning Teletypes and modems. Dial TWX used the 101 family of modems, which were installed in the cabinet of the machines. The modem required most of the elements of a telephone, so Teletype Corp. had to build that into the call control unit. There was a 99 wire cable between the machine as made by Teletype and the modem as made by Western Electric. The other service that came out about the same time was DataPhone, which used the same modem but presumed that the operators would talk on a DDD call before switching to data transmission. Since TWX was priced cheaper than DataPhone the TWX set had no way to talk on the circuit. Some of the Bell operating companies realized that they could save some money by supplying a private-line Teletype and a 103 series modem, which had the modem and telephone all built into one package. Those modems used a separate tone pair for each direction of transmission. A strapping option controlled which tone pair would be used for originate or receive. Then each tone pair could use the higher or lower frequency tone for the mark signal. Thus there were eight different mutually incompatible services that could use the same modems. TWX and DataPhone were two of them, and there were plans for a WADS and WADS-prime and maybe some additional non-interoperable services. FCC rejected the proposed WADS tariff. Then when DataPhone was being used mostly for terminal-to-computer operation there was no need for the terminal to accept incoming calls so the modem could be simplified by making it originate-only. And then the acoustic coupled modem came along as a way to avoid first renting a modem from Bell, and later to avoid paying for the Data Access Arrangement that Bell required for a while if you wanted to use a customer-provided modem. ***** Moderator's Note ***** IMNSHO, "Dataphone" was just a way to continue to offer TWX service without advertising it as TWX, after AT&T was forced to sell the TWX network to Western Union. I never saw anyone use the phone on the side of the Teletypes that we rented under "Dataphone" service. To be fair, most Dataphone Teletypes were used for computer access, so there was little need to talk on them anyway. I don't know if there was an option to strap them for full-duplex, though, and if there wasn't, users had to put up with transmission errors that they wouldn't see at the time they were typed. Bill Horne Moderator ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Mon, 16 Jan 2017