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From: floyd@hayes.ims.alaska.edu (Floyd Davidson)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: *Long* Phone Calls -- What Does Ma Think?
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Date: 19 Nov 90 12:56:12 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 835, Message 8 of 15


In article <68873@bu.edu.bu.edu> Jack.Winslade@f666.n285.z1.f
idonet.org (Jack Winslade) writes:

>In message <1190094024@iugate.UUCP>, "andrew M. Boardman" writes:

>{ ... in regards to >>VERY<< long calls }

>>  - What would one's local phone company think of this?
>>  - In the expected case that they aren't too fond of losing
>>    out on the megabucks for a leased line, do they have
>>    legal ground telling you to stop?

>Back around 1970 or so, there was a belief held by some members of the
>  [ much interesting text deleted ]

>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.

I can't speak to 1970 or local phone companies, either.  But you might
be interested to know that at 8:00 AM every morning the Tech-In-Charge
at the Fairbanks Toll Center gets a print out of any (usually there
are none) AMA records that are excessively long.  I personally wrote
the little program that scans the logs and looks for any such log
reports.

But of course we are an LD carrier, so our *hope* is that it is a real
call!  But we check out every one of them just to prevent someone
getting a huge bill when it is our fault.  In fact most of them end up
being a telco dialed into a milliwatt test or something to that
effect.


Floyd L. Davidson   floyd@hayes.ims.alaska.edu    floydd@chinet.chi.il.us
Salcha, AK 99714    connected by paycheck to Alascom, Inc.
When *I* speak for them, one of us will be *out* of business in a hurry.