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From: rmadison@euler.berkeley.edu (Linc Madison)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Strange Charges on Bill
Message-ID: <5428@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 21 Mar 90 03:27:51 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 190, Message 3 of 6


In article <5236@accuvax.nwu.edu> David Tamkin writes:
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 177, Message 8 of 10

>1. Can your local telco really block all outgoing long distance calls?
>They can assign no 1+ carrier, but can they block 10XXX?  [Perhaps the
>link is not used for calls dialed via 950-YXXX or a carrier's 800
>dial-up, but use of those carries a surcharge that can outstrip the
>subscriber line charge fairly quickly.]

Oh, yes!  (But, of course, they charge you extra for the privilege.)
I know 'cause when I were a undergrad, we had a computer terminal in
my eating club, with a modem for dialing up the campus mainframe.  We
were very concerned, though, about leaving a phone in a
publicly-accessible area (especially 'cause it were a really cheap
modem which required you to dial from a phone).  NJBell arranged "toll
blocking," which means that any attempt to dial any non-local call
would result in re-order.  Then again, they didn't actually do it when
they said they had.

In a similar situation more recently here in California (where I is a
grad student), we have a Centrex system with forward-on-no-answer to a
common answering machine.  The answering machine line is blocked for
all non-Centrex outgoing calls, but can receive calls from anywhere.
We thus got (at *no* charge, even from Pac*Bell!) a service feature
with a name something along the lines of Collect/Third Party Blocking,
which prevents any incoming calls from being billed to the line.


Linc Madison   =   rmadison@euler.berkeley.edu