Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!bellcore!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: sham@arizona.edu (Shamim Zvonko Mohamed) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: STD/ISD in Commonwealth Countries Message-ID: Date: 20 Sep 89 18:49:24 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Lines: 47 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 392, message 3 of 5 In India the term for long distance is indeed STD. I'm not sure about ISD, though. I may as well take this opportunity for some reminiscences... the phone system is, of course, a government monopoly under the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. They handle all phone lines, trunks, telex, microwave links, etc. Ah, the telephone service! Those memories... some areas in New Delhi (where I grew up) have a waiting list of 10 years for a 'phone connection. No DTMF dialing here, almost all the exchanges are mechanical. (About 5 years ago a digital switch was introduced on a trial basis - worked quite well, from what I remember.) In the summer after almost every rainstorm thousands (I'm not exaggerating!) would be knocked out. One of my childhood memories is being taken to a crossbar exchange by my father (he used to be in the telecom field and had a few cronies in the Post and Telegraphs Department) and watching/listening to those things. I was about 8 at the time and can't really remember the details, though. :-( My grandfather's phone was even more interesting - it was on a rural exchange and had an operator that would complete calls by plugging jacks on a board (don't know the jargon for this). The exchange itself was about 6 miles away and every summer the line would be destroyed by the monsoon. (This was about 5 years ago) STD was introduced about 10 years ago, I think, and was more expensive than the regular operator-assisted "trunk call." (To make one of those you had to call a number and book the call at some priority, with the cost increasing geometrically with higher priorities... it would often be 4-6 hours for the call to go through at the affordable priorities) The trunk call may still be cheaper than an STD call. The city codes for STD calls are of variable length - for instance New Delhi is 11 but smaller towns have upto 4 digits. Caveat: All of the above information is at least 3 years old. Shamim Mohamed / {uunet,noao,allegra,cmcl2..}!arizona!sham / sham@arizona.edu "Take this cross and garlic; here's a Mezuzah if he's Jewish; a page of the Koran if he's a Muslim; and if he's a Zen Buddhist, you're on your own." [Moderator's Note: 'STD' means Subscriber Trunk Dialing, for those who did not know this abbreviation. It is a common enough phrase in some countries which essentially means 'long distance' as we think of it here in the United States. I might add to the above report, calling DA in India is quite a chore at times also. I've been on 15 minutes to get a single number. PT]