Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request
From: covert@covert.enet.dec.com (John R. Covert  03-Mar-1990 0837)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: The CCITT Recommendation on International D.A.
Message-ID: <4692@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 3 Mar 90 13:53:10 GMT
Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu
Organization: TELECOM Digest
Lines: 49
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 141, Message 4 of 7


Matthias Urlichs writes:
 
>Last time I was in the US, I had to get a number in Nuernberg
>(Nuremberg to you), West Germany.
 
>I had lots of fun convincing first the International D.A. and then the
>operator to place the call (no intl dialing...) that the area code of
>Nuernberg is in fact valid -- it's 911, which seems to be used for a
>quite different purpose in the US...

The problem here was that you probably "said too much."  To call D.A.
in Germany, an operator just presses the "Overseas" button and dials
49-1188.  (In accordance with the CCITT recommendation, this doesn't
work for us mere mortals.)

You should have simply said "please get me Directory Assistance for
Nuernberg, Germany."  She would have looked up the location in the
routing guide and dialled what it told her to dial.  Incoming
International D.A. for all of Germany is handled in Ffm, and your
providing the area code only confused matters.

An exception to the above is D.A. for U.S., Canadian, and British
Military.  The routing guide lists all the military prefixes, and AT&T
will call the U.S. military PBX information operators as a free D.A.
call, dialling the same number you could have dialled for a fee.  This
is why, when you say "D.A.  for Nuernberg, please," the operator will
often ask "is that military."

>On the other hand, I was astonished that there are still corners in
>the US (it was somewhere near Philadelphia, in fact) where one still
>couldn't dial international calls directly,

This has been discussed before -- No. 5 XBar offices in most of the
country (PacTel apparently being an exception) do not have the
register capacity to handle the long numbers.

>or (once in Boston) where the public phone where I dialled 011-49-911-...
>seemed to have overlooked the first five digits, and the call was free. :-)

I suspect if you had tried any other international number it might
have been free as well.  There is a fairly common No. 1 ESS C.O.
programming error which makes all 011+ calls free.  If undiscovered by
the masses, the bug may hang around for years.  If the location of the
misprogrammed phones gets published and people start using them, the
phone company will often try to have the police catch some of the
offenders before fixing the problem.

/john