Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: 0004133373@mcimail.com (Donald E. Kimberlin) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Best and Worst (Was Re: Labor Day, 1990) Message-ID: <12080@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 13 Sep 90 03:39:54 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: Telecommunications Network Architects, Safety Harbor, FL Lines: 88 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 640, Message 7 of 8 Mark reports: >The best telephone system I've seen is in ... Botswana. I believe it, Mark. What most people cannot believe is that the nations that had a poor, antiquated public network, tend to rebuild with the latest and best when they do. I recall putting the latest generation TDM's running high-speed sync modems on lines in countries Americans couldn't believe that of ... including Botswana. (In fact, life in Gaborones was so pleasant to me that I still think of retiring there. Nice to know the phones are up to snuff now!) Mark continues: >whilst in Italy - I couldn't get through to Botswana...so I ended >up dialling to my machine in South Africa...and back out to Botswana. Later Mark writes: >Talk about routing... >How many other non-USA countries use BT to do routing to Kuwait? Probably most all, Mark. The simple economic fact is that until or unless the volume of traffic directly between two nations is profitable, "transit calls" are run via a third country. The practice is very common, and has been for years. >I wonder if this implies that any country that South Africa >does not route directly to is routed via BT? While BT probably gets the lion's share, others that have more direct links to places of interest are likely as well. Paris for francophone countries or Madrid for Spanish lands are likely examples. Sometimes, telecommunications transits are surprising. Here's one I bet no one would ever expect: Sitting in the hotel room In Lusaka, Zambia, waiting through the 8-hour delay quoted on calls to the US, my phone finally rang, and I heard the Zambian operator on line saying, "OK, Johannesburg, I have the party on line for ticket nnnnn now..go ahead, party." Just even try to mail a letter between Lusaka and Jo'burg! Telecomm may make stranger bedfellows than politics! (If you want to know more about details of international telephone routing, look into special reports of the CCITT. They detail trunk and transit liaisons, minutes of traffic carried, and forecasts on both. The CCITT "plan" is what telephone people the world around work from ... another function of the "standards body.") Then in article Dale Nieburg writes of 911 dialing errors in rural West Virginia and the persistent "wall of denial" answers of C&P Telephone. This illustrates so well that despite supposed "jolts" of the breakup that Telcos cry about, minds INSIDE local Telcos still have not changed. The "monopoly mentality" still prevails there. C&P's answer, "Just wait for the new switching machine," is best classed as "Telephone Man's Stock Put-Off Number 54-B." What amazes me, as Dale's notes in the quote point up, is HOW the public continues to gobble such trash. 1.) WHY doesn't anyone ask them how the new machine is going to fix the cable pairs C&P points to as the probable cause? (C&P must have secretly developed "intelligent cable" somewhere in West Virginia; cable pairs that can dial digits meaningfully...now, there MUST be a marketplace opportunity in that somehow!) Cable that can dial digits is Telephone Man's Stock Put-Off Number 13-C. 2.) WHY doesn't anybody ASK C&P just WHO is responsible for that piece of cable they keep intimating is the subscriber's responsibility? Denying responsibility for their own plant is Telephone Man's Stock Put-Off Number 33-D. 3.) The marvelous twist of logic about assigning ONE person in the user organization to track the trouble reports is yet another aspect of the "monopoly mentality." Within the confines of a single sentence, the problem of multiple people inside the Telco gets thrown back around into a management problem the customer is supposed to be overseeing. Telling the customer they should keep track of a recurrent case is Telephone Man's Stock Put-Off Number of 8-B. The bottom line of all this is that while our Moderator thinks all the problems of divestiture should have been solved three years ago, many of the very causes of the Lynching of Ma Bell still circulate around her corpse. Don't blame our government for that, too, Dear Moderator!