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From: ceb@csli.stanford.edu (Charles Buckley)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Distinctive Ringing
Message-ID: <15629@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 22 Dec 90 09:08:37 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 900, Message 7 of 11


Recently I wrote:

>In another bit of PacBell stupidity, I recently tried to get
>distinctive ringing on my single line...
>Is this Catch-22 idiocy nationwide, or is it only PacBell that has
>this problem?

To which Pat Townson, the mMderator, replied:

>[Moderator's Note: . . . [IBT]
>could not offer Distinctive Ringing until recently when they upgraded
>their software. They did offer it in Centrex and Starline service, but
>not on single residential lines until ahout two months ago.   PAT]

And to which Pete Ahrens of PacBell, wrote (ex-officio), that
Distinctive Ringing was part of a market strategy aimed at Centrex
customers, to distinguish outside calls from within.  He then went on
at length, essentially about RBOC's like PacBell making serious
efforts to bring Centrex to the masses.  He finished by writing:

"In the case of your poster, notice he has only one line.  The presence
of an intragroup call is thus illogical (from this feature's point of
view) and there is no basis for distinctive ringing as the vendors
have defined it.

"I would humbly like to point out that the RBOC's do not in general
design these features.  Rather, the features are the result of
consultation, discussion, and review among the Bellcore Client
Companies, vendors such as Northern Telecom and ATT, and so on.  Quite
often, the feature the user "sees" is a set (some would say "kludge")
of these design-by-committee features."

To which I respond:

Well gee, let's all just wallow in apologism!  Seriously, do you think
anyone ever imagined that anything else was going on?

What you're saying is that PacBell depends primarily on Bellcore and
their hardware vendors to describe consumer demand to them.  This is
like collecting military intelligence by waiting for history books to
be published, and then reading them.

Any army that does this will lose.  You won't even catch Saddam doing
something so dumb.  The only reason PacBell gets away with it is that
it is a protected monopoly.  If the Japanese could sell dial tone
here, PacBell would fare even worse than GM and Ford have.

PacBell should clean up its act, and be responsive to customer
requests, period.  Sandbagging with saccharine politeness and
browbeating the customer by defining his requests as illogical are no
substitute, especially when others are willing to (but barred by law
from) fulfilling them.  These blocking strategies seem particularly
misplaced when they exist only to protect intra-organizational
political traditions.

Merry Christmas to you too.