Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: heath@shumv1.ncsu.edu (Heath Roberts) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Touchtone Fee Abolished in CA Message-ID: <9532@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 9 Jul 90 20:14:42 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: Heath Roberts Organization: NCSU Computing Center Lines: 53 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 470, Message 4 of 10 In article <9487@accuvax.nwu.edu> plouff@kali.enet.dec.com writes: >Historical questions: when was the last date that AT&T sold switching >equipment _without_ 100 percent tone dialing coverage? Competitors? >When was the last date AT&T sold switches without at least some >"custom calling" features as standard? Competitors? References such >as magazine articles would be most appreciated. >This is a relevant question for those of us who live with backwater >telephone service from NYNEX, as well as arteriosclerotic regulation >by the Mass. PUC. I can only speak directly of Northern Telecom, but I am assured by customers who work with AT&T equipment they ATT's systems are similar. To the first question: all switches come with tone receivers. But you need more than one tone receiver for a large switch: if you provide touch-tone service to 10,000 lines, you might need twenty of them. If your customers use the phone a lot, you might need thirty. The more lines you want to connect to tone receivers, the more tone receivers you need. Only one line can send tones to a given receiver at a time. The hardware to detect current loop (off-hook or pulse dialing, which is just a bunch of closely-spaced off-hook signals) is present on the line card itself: there's one per subscriber loop in the switch. So you can't really just ask about "100% coverage". It doesn't work that way. Trying to provide more touch-tone service without adding capacity is like trying to push a thousand cars an hour down a two lane road: things back up, everybody gets slowed down, etc. You have to add extra lanes in the long run. On the issue of software: switches are like cars. There's the basic model (switch o.s., no call processing) and then there are the features. Call processing is a popular one, so everybody orders it. ;-) In fact, a telephone switch would be useless without it. But beyond the basic POTS and switch O/S, everything's optional. Just like cars, there are attractively priced packages of common options, but they still cost extra. It always takes more hardware (and software) to provide these features -- you don't get something for nothing. The price of the hardware is coming down, but you need more and more of it (you can actually put four Gigabytes of RAM--memory, not disk space--on your DMS-100 now if you need it). Software's also getting to be more and more complex, so telcos are spending proportionally more on software than they used to. These costs are the reason I think I'm justified in saying that CLASS features, although not "advanced" in concept, and even though they're pretty common, cost operating companies more to provide than POTS. Heath Roberts NCSU Computer and Technologies Theme Program heath@shumv1.ncsu.edu