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From: BRUCE@ccavax.camb.com (Barton F. Bruce)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Telco "Customer Service"
Message-ID: <14083@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 27 Oct 90 03:57:16 GMT
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In article <13940@accuvax.nwu.edu>, oberman@rogue.llnl.gov writes:

> implementation of TT. The town is still on the old (circa 1950?)
> rotary switch. Of course it can't handle TT in any way, right?

> What Mountain Bell (now USWest) did was put DTMF receivers on the
> input to the switch which output pulses. So I entered the tones and
> could hear the pulses being generated in the background. And, no, it

 From about the start of TT there have been various converters for
steppers.  Many simply bolted to the frame behind the linefinders.
Mitel made a "QuadPak" that took four cards, and later, as TT decoding
got more compact their old #1625 cards zillions of which plugged into
these, were upgraded to newer models that could do two lines per card.
Actually the card space could by then do even more, but there were
only card edge connections enough for one more line in the vast
installed base of boxes.

TelTone and others also made such devices, and their cards would slide
into Mitel boxes, too.

Another popular trick, rather than having a TT decoder per linefinder,
was to have a few decoders, and some sort of allocater circuit between
the linefinder and first selector. In 'slenderised' offices, something
'smart' was stuck in that location anyway, to possibly alter what you
dialed into what was needed to transit the selectors. Such a box could
have TT added easily.

The bummer is that they don't always drop off the line. They are
supposed to quit on a timer, or on answer supervision, but if they
don't and you need to TT to the far end, try # or occasionally * to
disable the decoder.

With residential TT $s on the rise here in MA, I have been considering
digging out some old 1625s I have stashed away. They ARE strappable
for 48 or 24 v dc, and for 10 or 20 PPS. At 20 pps (which any xbar or
electronic offic should be able to use), the delay is barely
noticable.

Anyone know of a really good but cheap TT-> pulse converter that
properly deals with ALL the many problems? I havn't looked at that
market in years, but with the chips now available, there just might be
something in the < one year of TT service price range. LECs charging
for TT deserve to lose the revenue.