Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!rutgers!sun-barr!apple!bionet!hayes.ims.alaska.edu!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: john@bovine.ati.com (John Higdon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: *Long* Phone Calls -- What Does Ma Think? Message-ID: <14788@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 18 Nov 90 03:42:57 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: John Higdon Organization: Green Hills and Cows Lines: 61 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 831, Message 7 of 8 Jack Winslade writes: > Yes, I know about 'chasing permanents', but this was in the NYC area > circa 1970, where many of the offices were aging panel and #1 crossbar > that were held together with scotch tape and typically had such things > like unused twisted-pair jumpers banjo-strung all over the frames. > The switch crews were busy just keeping the switches up, let alone > tracing permanents (if the PS lamps weren't burned out. ;-) There was > some kind of a tape-based CAMA system that billed a whole group of > offices from a central point. I think some of the offices still > billed for local units with 'odometer' type counters which were > photographed each month. A little clarification on the term "permanent signal" is in order. A telephone that has been off the hook for a long time is not necessarily a "permanent signal" and it most certainly is not if connected to another telephone through the network. PS refers to lines that have come off-hook and are pulling dial tone without dialing, or have been involved with conversation and have failed to go on-hook at call termination. There is no need to "trace permanents". When a line comes off hook and the dial tone times out, it generally goes to a howler trunk for a few minutes to attempt to alert the customer of the off-hook condition and then it is connected to a PS trunk. This is what the PS lamps are connected to. A glance at the board will show how may lines are PS at any given moment. It is a simple matter to identify a particular line associated with a given PS trunk. A major alarm condition exists if many lines go PS at once. This is usually indicative of cable failure and can bring down an office if corrective action isn't taken immediately. The offending cable is usually identified so that it can be cut loose from the switch until it is repaired. Anyway, a permanent signal is quite different from a "long call". As to whether a charge can be avoided by making the call long enough so that it spans mulitple call recording media, this has long been rumored but not confirmed by anyone I know. My suspicion is that it won't work, since a call record is laid down at the conclusion of the call, being held in memory until written to tape. The data recorders that I have seen at Pac*Bell don't even write each call, but wait until many calls are ready to be written and then the tape barely moves, writing many call records. > Maybe some of the 'experts' on billing systems could confirm if this > was true at that time. I am, of course, assuming that if it were > true, the case has been dealt with and the modern billing software is > smart enough to catch it and bill for it. Possibly this would have worked back in the days of the punched tape, since I believe the start time and end time for a call were written to the tape at the moment of occurrance. When the tapes were read by the billing office, the start time was linked to the matching end time to provide the call "ticket". How far apart these would have to be to cause a ticket to disappear is unknown. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@bovine.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !