Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!bionet!hayes.ims.alaska.edu!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request
From: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: NY Times Method For Conducting Phone Poll
Message-ID: <13874@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 21 Oct 90 18:00:37 GMT
Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Lines: 62
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 751, Message 4 of 9


>[Moderator's Note: I think they made the assumption (mostly correct)
>that business phones would probably not be non-pub; thus in the
>process of sorting out who to call and who not to call, all non-pubs
>were assumed to be residential for the purpose of filing the number in
>one compartment or another.   PAT]

Hearty Guffaw!  Here at UCSD we have about 200 dial-in modem lines, of
which some 75 or so are in the same prefix (558) as those assigned to
the student housing, and another 20+ in the 452 prefix, which is split
between homes in the surrounding community, and various small
centrexen serving nearby firms.  Our modem numbers are NOT en-bloc,
since we add lines typically 8 or 16 at a time as demand grows, and it
often seems that we often get all the numbers ending in odd digits.

We only publish the pilot numbers for the six hunt groups these lines
all belong to (each is a different grade of modem service).  All the
rest are non-pub, as are most business centrex numbers, so such a
survey (or solicitation attack) would wind up targeting a whole lot of
business and modem lines among the residences.  I don't think they
would be able to tell which is which ahead of time; it's a real mixed
bag.

This is beside the 534 prefix, which we completely own, and 543 and
294 each of which is about half ours.  In a year or so, if campus
telecommunications removes all PacBell service from the dorms and
replaces student phones with campus lines, as they've been discussing,
we'll probably own half of another prefix as well - about half our
students live in campus housing.

I suspect the newspaper's screening process involves a lot of
apologizing to inappropriate dialees.  That and hanging up on machines.

(Actually, it's pretty easy to tell which are our dial-in modem lines.
They're the ones that are busy all evening long!)


Brian


[Moderator's Note: You refer to those numbers as non-published, but I
think you mean 'non-listed' or 'not listed in the directory'. The
difference between these two conditions is the one is unavailable,
period, and the other, while not listed in the directory will still
usually show up in a cross-reference directory, typically with just
the company name and no address given, or a reference to the lead
number in the group. I think people preparing the list of 'random'
numbers for these polls do first select randomly, then use criss-cross
directories to backtrack them into residence, business or payphone
categories. So if they pick (for example) random number 708-491-1234
in Evanston, IL, looking at the criss-cross will show only a relative
handful of entries under 708-491. No where near the 9000+ numbers the
exchange might have are listed. But the several dozen that are listed
all say 'Northwestern University such and such' ... so the random
number compiler assumes the whole exchange is probably Northwestern. 
Likewise if the criss-cross directory lists a number with a business
name and then skips the next two dozen numbers before it starts
listing again, its reasonable to say the numbers following are linked
to the first one. For exchanges that go on page after page in the
criss-cross listing one residence after another, a skipped entry is
probably a residence with a non-pub number. But it is not that often
that a business will have its main incoming number non-pub.   PAT]