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The Telecom Digest for February 25, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 53 : "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: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:21:15 +0000 (UTC)
From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Supermarket shop by mobile phone
Message-ID: <ji6vnb$h4t$1@reader1.panix.com>
HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> wrote:
:The elimination of a charge for DTMF came well after Divesture, about
:when ESS was universal.
That varied a lot. Bell Atlantic in NJ charged a buck extra for touch tone,
at least on some classes of residential lines in the late 90s. I had
one, and had a long fight about paying, or not, a dollar for a feature
I never used. Most of the time, I didn't even have a phone attached
to the line, just an answering machine, as I had ISDN provided by, and
paid for, [by] my employer. I wanted a number I could give to people who
insisted they needed one, or whom I'd like to get a message from (like
the mechanic, or the vet, or the bank) but who I didn't care to have to
talk to.
The field craft I talked to didn't think they could actully provision
a line without touchtone.
- -
sig 108
***** Moderator's Note *****
Around the Boston, MA area, there were some neighborhoods (i.e., some
exchanges) where the word got around that everyone had Touch-Tone
service, so customers stopped paying for it. Ma Bell decided to
retrofit the exchanges in question with dial-pulse-only receivers, and
to endure the cost of maintaining a separate class code for Touch-Tone
subscribers, so the word must have gotten around to a lot of people.
It goes to show that nobody wants to pay for a service that
anybody else gets for free.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:10:06 -0500
From: T <kd1s.nospam@cox.nospam.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Supermarket shop by mobile phone
Message-ID: <MPG.29b1aa996fa26d3a989d2c@news.eternal-september.org>
In article <ji6vnb$h4t$1@reader1.panix.com>, dscheidt@panix.com says...
>
> HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> wrote:
>
> :The elimination of a charge for DTMF came well after Divesture, about
> :when ESS was universal.
>
> That varied a lot. Bell Atlantic in NJ charged a buck extra for touch tone,
> at least on some classes of residential lines in the late 90s. I had
> one, and had a long fight about paying, or not, a dollar for a feature
> I never used. Most of the time, I didn't even have a phone attached
> to the line, just an answering machine, as I had ISDN provided by, and
> paid for, [by] my employer. I wanted a number I could give to people who
> insisted they needed one, or whom I'd like to get a message from (like
> the mechanic, or the vet, or the bank) but who I didn't care to have to
> talk to.
>
> The field craft I talked to didn't think they could actully provision
> a line without touchtone.
>
> - -
> sig 108
>
> ***** Moderator's Note *****
>
> Around the Boston, MA area, there were some neighborhoods (i.e., some
> exchanges) where the word got around that everyone had Touch-Tone
> service, so customers stopped paying for it. Ma Bell decided to
> retrofit the exchanges in question with dial-pulse-only receivers, and
> to endure the cost of maintaining a separate class code for Touch-Tone
> subscribers, so the word must have gotten around to a lot of people.
>
> It goes to show that nobody wants to pay for a service that
> anybody else gets for free.
>
> Bill Horne
> Moderator
The same was true in Providence, RI. Every line had DTMF enabled. To my
knowledge they never went through the motions of installing dial-pulse-
only here.
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:32:57 -0500
From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Supermarket shop by mobile phone
Message-ID: <1jguj4i27fjbj.6ybq854fvelb$.dlg@40tude.net>
On Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:02:57 -0800 (PST), HAncock4 wrote, en passant:
> ... The original TT phone keypads had only ten digits. ...
Yup: I still have a desk-set of that sort (ivory color, l500D of 5-66).
Cheers, -- tlvp
- -
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
***** Moderator's Note *****
Good point: I remember using some of those sets. I'd really like to
know why the "Asterisk" (or is it "Star"?) and Octothorpe keys were
added, and when. They were used for "Class" services, of course, but
were also important for IVR systems, so that date might be a good
anchor point for the introduction of IVR technology.
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:58:02 -0500
From: T <kd1s.nospam@cox.nospam.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Supermarket shop by mobile phone
Message-ID: <MPG.29b0e2de670b370c989d2b@news.eternal-september.org>
In article
<1329923334.65934.YahooMailClassic@web111712.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>,
wleathus@yahoo.com says...
>
> --- On Tue, 2/21/12, David Scheidt <dscheidt@panix.com> wrote:
>
> > I don't know, fifteen years of selling groceries online seems to be
> > enough to say if they're going to manage to succeed. Peapod are a
> > subsidery of Royal Ahold, a Dutch supermarket congolmerate. Ahold
> > owns both Giant and Stop & Shop.
>
> In the days when grocery delivery was common. you had to leave
> your door unlocked or have a maid or other attendant. Many foods are
> perishable and can't just be dumped on the front porch. There also
> had to be someone to pay the delivery person unless credit was
> extended.
>
> When I was growing up my mother ordered groceries (there were two
> deliveries a day) and the delivery person came around to the back and
> brought them right into the kitchen.
>
> Another product was milk, almost always delivered. You could pick a
> time you wanted it delievered (at two hour intervals, as I recall) and
> at one time there were six different dairies calling on us for their
> business in Oklahoma City (I believe not quite that many in St. Louis
> and I don't remember how many in Dallas).
>
> Now there are no milk delivery men and no grocers that deliver.
>
> Wes Leatherock
> wleathus@yahoo.com
> wesrock@aol.com
Here in Providence, RI we still have one delivery outfit, Munroe Dairy.
I remember getting a tour of the facility they use when I as a kid and
was suprised to see they still do deliveries.
The product mix is interesting too!
https://www.cowtruck.com/products/products_list_all.php?cmd=reset&sel_category_id=1
***** Moderator's Note *****
I called the dairy, and talked to Lindsay Armstrong-Mitchel. She told
me that they still take orders over the phone, without benefit of an
IVR system, although they prefer that customers use the web, since
they have over 300 products and serve a multi-lingual client base.
Ms. Armstrong-Mitchel told me that their average phone order is $20,
whereas the average web order is $35: phone orders, however, are more
profitable, because their sales force can "upsell" higher-value items.
As an example, she cited a sale they had for "lobster ravioli" last
December: they sold more online, but phone orders generated more, (and
more profitable) follow-on sales for related items used in preparation
of a sauce to go with the ravioli.
The company's customers, she said, are mostly young families, but they
are seeing more childless, professional couples as time goes by.
I asked if they serve a lot of physically-challenged customers who are
unable to shop for themselves, but Ms. Armstrong-Mitchel said that
they have thirty routes, and handicapped customers are only one or two
stops per route.
When I inquired what benefit her customers get by ordering deliveries:
Ms. Armstrong-Mitchel told me that taking kids to the store is
expensive, and told me that industry studies show families spend 40
extra dollars when they go to the supermarket, not just in "kiddie
grab" items, but in impulse buys by adults.
Long story short: ordering groceries by phone is alive and well - and
sometimes cheaper than going to the supermarket!
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 08:27:15 +1100
From: David Clayton <dc33box-usenet@yahoo.com.au>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year's End
Message-ID: <pan.2012.02.23.21.27.12.161585@yahoo.com.au>
On Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:48:50 -0500, Monty Solomon wrote:
>
> Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year's End
>
> By NICK BILTON
> FEBRUARY 21, 2012
>
> People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits
> of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made
> glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer's eyeballs
> in real time.
>
> According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked
> not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of
> the year. These people said they are expected "to cost around the price of
> current smartphones," or $250 to $600.
>
> The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be
> Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches
> from someone's eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a
> number of sensors including motion and GPS.
>
> A Google spokesman declined to comment on the project.
>
> ...
>
>
> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/google-to-sell-terminator-style-glasses-by-years-end/
>
.........
Anyone remember the move "The Last Starfighter" where the invading aliens
had little HUD screens which sat a few inches off their face and also
moved out of the way?
I presume someone is going to claim a patent on this sort of thing and
there will be (another) big court fight....
--
Regards, David.
David Clayton
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a
measure of how many questions you have.
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:48:42 -0800 (PST)
From: Joseph Singer <joeofseattle@yahoo.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Supermarket shop by mobile phone
Message-ID: <1330048122.82640.YahooMailClassic@web161504.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
ed, 22 Feb 2012 07:08:54 -0800 (PST)Wes Leatherock wrote:
> Another product was milk, almost always delivered. You could pick a
> time you wanted it delievered (at two hour intervals, as I recall)
> and at one time there were six different dairies calling on us for
> their business in Oklahoma City (I believe not quite that many in
> St. Louis and I don't remember how many in Dallas).
> Now there are no milk delivery men and no grocers that deliver.
I grew up in a bedroom community of Portland, Maine and we had
multiple services that came to the house. Milk was left in a special
carrier provided by the milk company and they left glass refillable
bottles. Other services that served us were a local bakery delivered
baked goods. The local dry cleaner also delivered.
When I was a young'un and visited with grams in Hyannis on the cape
she had two different milk companies deliver (grams had lots of
families from all her family descend in the summer at the cape.
As far as grocery delivery here in Seattle we have Amazon Fresh. I
believe Safeway also delivers. There are also casualties of the
grocery delivery business among them are WebVan which went belly up in
2001. Perusing the Wikipedia article on WebVan it also mentions other
like-minded similar businesses.
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 22:54:35 +0000 (UTC)
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Bell research, was: Supermarket shop by mobile phone
Message-ID: <ji6g3a$jn3$1@reader1.panix.com>
In <f4751964-7e5e-4042-829b-d860d4f6c869@l14g2000vbe.googlegroups.com> HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> writes:
[snippeth]
>"Human Factors Engineering Studies of the Design and Use of Pushbutton
>Telephone Sets", July 1960
>
>http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol39-1960/articles/bstj39-4-995.pdf
>
>(This goes into extensive detail about how they designed the keypad
>based on human studies. They experimented with various key arrange-
>ments as well as pressure and travel [while] depressing the key.
>I wonder if designers of modern electronic equipment do as much
>research.)
[expletive deleted] NO, they don't. As a simple and clear example, the
buttons on Genuine Bell Touch Tone phones were concave (rounded
downward) so your fingers were "pulled" into them and were more likely
to give you the number you wanted.
Take a look at today's keypads - not just on phones but on ATMs and
huge groups of other devices. In addition to being too small, with
impossible to read print... far, far, too many of them are made of
slippery surfaces and are convex, just about ensuring your fingers
will slip off.
(the issue about "full travel" versus just a small push down.. gets
into religious attitudes, so is best left out of this discussion)
- Oh, and not just keypads. The whole category of human factors
engineering has been sliding into the dustbins of history...
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:41:19 -0800 (PST)
From: Wes Leatherock <wleathus@yahoo.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Supermarket shop by mobile phone
Message-ID: <1330098079.73495.YahooMailClassic@web111722.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
--- On Wed, 2/22/12, John F. Morse <john@example.invalid> wrote:
> That was my understanding. VF repeaters couldn't pass dial pulses.
> The DLL (Dial Long Line) equipment was not cheap. It occupied a rack
> unit or two. It used power. It created heat. Contacts got dirty. It
> was noisy.
> Solid-state sender conversion kits were not that expensive, and
> solved the problem for older COs, like the 1XB, and early 5XB.
> I wonder if they were available for SXS offices?
Indeed they were avilable,but for SxS offices they were an add-on, not
just a conversion, and sufficiently expensive that many step offices
were never equpped with them.
Wes Leatherock
wleathus@yahoo.com
wesrock@aol.com
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:12:51 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Is Throttling Smartphones Pointless?
Message-ID: <p06240897cb6d756b5526@[10.0.1.8]>
Is Throttling Smartphones Pointless? Study Suggests So
By BRIAN X. CHEN
February 23, 2012
AT&T, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA all practice data throttling,
which involves slowing Internet transfer speeds for cellphone
customers who use too much data. This policy applies only to
customers with unlimited data plans, and the cellphone companies say
it is intended to prevent data hogs from overloading the network and
clogging it for everyone else. However, a new study suggests that
throttling doesn't address excessive data use at all.
Validas, a company that analyzes wireless bills, said it looked at
data from 55,000 cellphone bills from AT&T and Verizon subscribers in
2011. Depending on the conditions of their networks, AT&T and Verizon
sometimes throttle customers who are in the top 5 percent of data
users. So Validas analyzed data use on bills from unlimited data
plans and customers on limited, tiered plans to calculate the amount
of data used by the top 5 percent for each type of customer.
The results? For Verizon bills, the top 5 percent of data customers
on unlimited plans used nearly the same amount of data as those on
tiered plans. And for AT&T, the top 5 percent of customers on
unlimited data plans used only slightly more data than those on
limited plans.
...
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/data-throttling-validas/
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:49:02 -0800 (PST)
From: Wes Leatherock <wleathus@yahoo.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Monitoring Your Health With Mobile Devices
Message-ID: <1330098542.3133.YahooMailClassic@web111716.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
--- On Thu, 2/23/12, Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> wrote:
> Monitoring Your Health With Mobile Devices
> By PETER WAYNER February 22, 2012
> Dr. Eric Topol is only half joking when he says the smartphone is
> the future of medicine - because most of his patients already seem
> "surgically connected" to one.
> But he says in all seriousness that the smartphone will be a sensor
> that will help people take better control of their health by
> tracking it with increasing precision. His book, "The Creative
> Destruction of Medicine," lays out his vision for how people will
> start running common medical tests, skipping office visits and
> sharing their data with people other than their physicians.
...A study I saw in the morning paper said only 6 per cent of seniors
(75+) have smart phones. Since the majority of medical costs occur in
the last two years of life, it seems this is not very effective at
this time.
Wes Leatherock
wleathus@yahoo.com
wesrock@aol.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/technology/personaltech/monitoring-your-health-with-mobile-devices.html
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