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From: DREUBEN@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Douglas Scott Reuben)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Alliance Teleconferencing
Message-ID: <15302@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 9 Dec 90 17:19:44 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 871, Message 11 of 11


Re: Alliance being available 24 hours a day only via the 800 number...

 From what I gather from use and conversations with AT&T, Alliance 700
access *used* to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This was
around 1984 or 1985, when AT&T was just started to promote the
service.

A number of things happened when 700 access was started: The first,
and easier to correct, was that many payphones actually allowed you to
dial 700 Alliance, and place conference calls around the world for
free!. Many people at my school had figured this out pretty quickly
(or heard about it on some BBS), and I can recall that ALL of the
payphones on my hall were perpetually in use because people were
calling and conferencing all of their friends.  After I figured out
what was going on (I had never heard of Alliance before), I found out
that you could transfer calls, by hitting "#6", to another location,
and that location could then control the conference, without being
billed for it.

This explained why many of the payphones were always left off the
hook, with signs saying "DO NOT *EVER* HANG UP". If someone came to
the payphone and needed to use it, there was a code you could enter
(can't recall, maybe #9?) that would let you break away from the main
conference and go back to being a controller. You could then make a
call to another location, let the person who needed to use the
payphone complete his/her call, and then rejoin the conference or
transfer control back to someone else.

Needless to say, AT&T didn't like this too much, and they quickly
disabled Alliance 700 access from payphones. They also killed the "#6"
transfer feature from 700 access around the same time. (Interestingly,
right after they killed 700 Allaince access from payphones, a number
of Charge-A-Calls suddenly got three-way calling! Maybe that was
supposed to be some sort of consolation? :) )

Anyhow, after all this died down, AT&T's second problem was that
people were using Alliance from PBX's. IE, you dial into a PBX, enter
"1234" which was all too often the access code, and then dial out
Alliance 700, and presto! -- more toll-free conferencing. And since
Alliance had such good connections (this was before AT&T was fiber),
people would call into the PBX, get a hold of Alliance, and then call
to their SECOND line.

They would leave this in place until they needed to make a call
(usually a modem call which was affected by noisy lines), at which
time they enter a third number to Alliance, thus connecting their
SECOND line to the new number. In other words, callers would call
Alliance via PBX, and then call themselves back, and "park" the call.
When they needed a clean line to some LD number: get out of "park"
mode, call your desired number, and you have now set up an ultra-clean
connection between your (non-controller) SECOND line and whatever
number you want to add to the conference via Alliance. (Got that? :) )

So the PBX owners and AT&T didn't like this too much either, and some
time in 1986 if I recall correctly, AT&T dropped 700 access on
weekends. Their reasoning for this was that there was very little
*legitimate* business use on weekends, and that customers who needed
to use Alliance at such times could afford the slight annoyance of
having to go through the 800 number and then get called back. This
*did* substantially cut down on fraud.

So that's basically why (as I am told) there is no 700 access during
weekends.

Also, I'm not sure if this was mentioned, but if you are planning a
conference call via Alliance, and know that all your conferees will be
in, let's say, New York, but you are in LA, it MAY be cheaper for you
to SPECIFY that you want to use the New York (White Plains) center
rather than the default of LA. Dialing 0-700-456-1000 gives you the
nearest center, yet as the above example demonstrates, this may not be
the most economical way to do things.  So, you can dial 0-700-456-100x, 
where x=1,2,3 or 4, each of which forces a call to a different center,
regardless of where you are. (It's been a while since I've used
Alliance, but I think -1001 is LA, -1003 is White Plains, and I don't
remember the other two.) This system of specifying which system you
want should also work for Alliance 2000 (audio-graphic?), ie,
0-700-456-200x, X=0, 1,2,3,4. There used to be a "test" or
non-published Alliance 3000 service, ie, 0-700-456-3000, which was for
mixed audio/video services, but I've never bothered finding out about
that.

Back in 1988 when I was using it, they were having a lot of billing
problems.  Most of them seemed to be problems with detecting when the
controller hung up. So if I called Alliance 1000 and didn't add anyone
and hung up after one minute, I would frequently get a bill that said
I was on for fifteen minutes!  I called AT&T each time this happened,
and they were glad to take these charges off my bill, and apologized
for any problems it may have caused me. Towards the end of 1988 they
appeared to have corrected the problem, but I haven't really used it
much since, so I can't really tell.

Finally, has the "LA" center been moved to Reno, NV? Dialing
0-700-456-1001 would always result in the message "This is Alliance
Teleconferencing in Los Angeles"... However, from the postings, it
seems that the center is in Reno now...is it new, or are they just
being more exact with their announcements?

Guess that's it.

Doug

dreuben@eagle.wesleyan.edu  dreuben@wesleyan.bitnet
(and just plain old "dreuben" to locals...!! :-)   )