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TELECOM Digest     Thu, 17 Aug 95 21:49:00 CDT    Volume 15 : Issue 349

Inside This Issue:                           Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Telecom and the End of WW-2 (Patrick Townson)
    Re: PacBell's New Network (Bradley Ward Allen)
    X.25 Access Providers (Adam Feinberg)
    Re: Rural Fibre (Mark Williston)

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----------------------------------------------------------------------



The first couple weeks in August saw numerous stories in the media
relating to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. There
was a great deal of discussion about the use of 'the bomb' to bring an
end to it all, both pro and con. Surely President Harry S Truman (known
back then at times as 'give em hell Harry' will be remembered for
his decision well into the next century if not longer.

            ---------------------------------------------
            "Mrs. Brown, what does the 'S' in President
            Truman's middle name stand for?" asked the
            one child of his teacher in that second grade
            classroom during the current events period
            that winter day in 1948 following Truman's
            election. Mrs. Brown started to explain that
            the /S/ was a 'stand-alone'; that is, that
            the single letter /S/ was his middle name
            and that therefore, when writing his name
            the use of a dot or 'period mark' following
            the S was inappropriate. It was not an abb-
            reviation of his middle name, it *was* his
            middle name. As she patiently explained all
            this, one child best left unnamed raised his
            hand to say, "My father says the 'S' stands
            for Shit!". Mrs. Brown tried hard to keep a
            straight face and keep from smirking.
            --------------------------------------------

In the initial stages of the exploration of nuclear power -- for all its
wonderfulness, for all its awfulness -- much of the work was done here
in the Chicago area at the University of Chicago. Living as I did in
the 1960's in the Hyde Park neighborhood and a matter of just two or
three blocks from the site where the first nuclear reaction was 
sustained
on that winter day in 1942, I was reminded of it whenever I walked
past the site and the commemorative placque installed there. Now the
University library; then the underside of the grandstand to Stagg Field.

Living as I did at the Windermere Apartment Hotel, 56th and Stony
Island Avenue, (FAIrfax-6000 for the switchboard, although most of the
tenants including myself had our own private lines in addition to an
extension on the hotel board; mine was HYDe Park 3714) I was very privil-
eged to be a nearby neighbor of Laura Fermi, the widow of Enrico
Fermi. She often took her dinner in the Anchorage, which was the name 
of the hotel dining room as did I, and she told a story once which I
hope will interest you as it did when she told it to me.

Her words from this point forward unless otherwise indicated:

In July, 1945 as the work neared completion, a great deal of final
research was being done, and a test explosion was planned for an
early morning in what is now the White Sands Missle Range area in
New Mexico. Enrico and several other scientists planned to be present
to observe the test, take measurements and other things. Actually,
the scientists and researchers were stationed over a fifty mile
or so area around the circumference of White Sands. Since Enrico
had some equipment to take along when we left home, we decided to
make the trip to Alamogordo by automobile, and it was a very hot,
very dusty two day trip for us, but we arrived in Alamogordo in
mid-afternoon the day before the test. The heat was, for me at
least, incredible. The temperature skirted around between 95 and
105 degrees all that summer there, we were told later by people who
had been on location for as much as month before the day of the
test. The temperature at night would drop to the upper seventies
or lower eighties perhaps by 3 am ... and the sun would rise at
a little before 5 am so that by midday the oppressive heat would return. 

After checking into our hotel -- the only one in Alamogordo, then
a town of a few thousand people -- we ate and went to bed since we
had to get an early start. About 3 am the next morning we arose, and
collected our gear to get to the test site. All this was very hush-
hush, we were all warned against saying anything at all to the local
people about the purpose of our visit. Enrico had been assigned to
a place about five miles outside of town and we got out there about
3:45 am. The test was scheduled for 4:30 am, but at about 4:15 am
it started raining. Raining hard too; they told me later it was the
first rain in the area all summer. The rain lasted about fifteen
minutes then stopped as suddenly as it had started. The thing we
immediatly noticed was the wonderful relief from the heat, as the
temperature had apparently dropped into the middle sixties as a
result. 

Well, 4:30 came ... no explosion. 4:35, then 4:40 ... just silence
and darkness across the desert as the sun started to rise. Enrico
was concerned that the test had not come off as scheduled, and he
wondered out loud if it might have been cancelled due to the rain.
We had no radio gear or other method of contacting the other people
in the area, and Enrico decided we should return to town and look
for a telephone to use to call the others and find out what was
happening. 

We got back into town at right about 5 am. The only thing open at that
time of night was the hotel where we were staying and Enrico told me
to wait in the car while he went in to make a call on the pay station
there. He returned two or three minutes later to say that the phone
was not working and that he had been unable to raise the operator.
He told me to start driving the car, and while I was driving, he was
looking out of the car window, glancing at the telephone poles and
the overhead wires. He would say 'turn left here' and I would drive
down one street, then he would say 'turn right' and I would go down
another street. 

As we drove down one street, I saw several houses as you would expect
to find anywhere, but one in particular was different. From all direc-
tions there were telephone poles around this house, in the front yard
and the back yard. The wires from the poles all came down and were
connected to some sort of a metal pipe or pole on the side of the
house; there were hundreds of wires there and they all then went in
through a hole into the side of the house.

Enrico said to park the car and I did. We got out and walked up to
the front porch of this house. The front porch light was burning,
and the front door was open, but the screen door on the front was
closed and latched from the inside. 

We looked inside and I saw a telephone switchboard in one corner of
the room. Several lights on it were blinking on and off, with 
people trying to reach the operator. Across the room from that
was a sofa with an end table, a lamp and a radio. The radio was
playing soft music, and the lamp was on. A fan was also there, turned
on blowing the air around.  On the sofa lay a woman sound asleep. She 
looked like a young woman about 18 or 19 years old.

Enrico banged on the screen door a couple times and rattled it
rather loudly. All of a sudden the woman opened her eyes and
looked at us standing there. She turned and looked at the switchboard
with all the lights blinking. Then she turned and looked at us again.
"Oh, my God!" she said excitedly. Pausing long enough to put a cigarette
in her mouth and light it, she rushed over and sat down at the board
and started frantically taking calls as fast as she could. 

Enrico and I walked back to the car and he drove immediatly out to
the test site and our assigned station. We got back to our spot at
about 5:30 or a few minutes after that, and we had only been there
a minute or less than two minutes when the test was conducted. To this
day now twenty five years later (PAT note: this was said in 1970)
I have never seen anything as spectacular as that morning in the New
Mexico desert. 

When we met with other scientists later that day we found out what
had happened. Although the test and the people involved were scattered
over a range of about fifty miles, all the communications between them
were routed through Alamogordo. The switchboard there was used to
connect everyone involved. Since everything was very top secret, I
guess they saw no reason to tell the telephone operator what they
would be doing, and obviously she did not not know. Normally I doubt
she handled more than two or three calls during the entire night, and
I know what happened in this case: the weather like it was, no one 
who worked a night shift was able to sleep during the day from the
heat, and then when you were at work the temperature would cool off
enough that you could sleep, just a little even though you were not
supposed to sleep; you were supposed to be working. The poor lady 
probably had not slept much for a couple days, then laying there on
that sofa reading or whatever between calls finally caught up with
her.

I doubt to this day that the lady is aware that her falling asleep
at the switchboard caused the first atomic explosion in the world
to be delayed by an hour and several minutes beyond its scheduled
time. 

  (end)   ------------------------------------

With dinner over and more coffee and after dinner liqueurs than anyone
should have, I left the Anchorage Windermere dining room and went back
upstairs to my apartment thinking of the time several years before
that I had walked over to the old Illinois Bell central office at 61st
and Kenwood about 1959-60. The entire first floor was given over to
the crossbars and frames with the telephone operators occupying the
second floor. Hot as blazes that evening also, all the windows were
open at 'Kenwood Bell' as they had not gotten around to air conditioning 
the place. Very few large companies or offices were air conditioned in
those years, we just had ceiling fans -- many of them -- around the
room.

When all the windows were open at Kenwood Bell, as they were apt to
be on a hot summer night, you could hear those switches a block away.
And when you walked past outside on the sidewalk, all you heard was
a constant chatter as the switches did their duty. That night also it
rained, and as the rain started and I darted into a doorway for
shelter, looking across the street at the central office I saw one
of the operators get up from the board, walk over and put first her
hand out the window, and then her head looking up. She felt the rain
coming down and began going around the room closing all the windows.
On the first floor, a man was doing the same. You had to close all 
the windows to keep the dampness from affecting the switchboard, but
little comfort that was to the people who were sweltering inside.

I thought Laura Fermi's account of (what is now) fifty years and a
month ago at White Sands might be of interest to the historians here.


PAT

------------------------------

key)


In <telecom15.346.8@eecs.nwu.edu> Steve Cogorno <cogorno@netcom.com> 
wrote:

> [...] THe new network is fiber optic to each neighborhood and then
> coax into each home.  [...]  According to PacBell, the target date
> for city-wide deployment is Summer 1996 (IMHO pretty fast for a city
> [San Jose] of 800,000 residents). [pp] Video services will be
> availible by that time, and by the end of 1996, PacBell will abandon
> it's regular copper network

It seems Pacific Bell will definately have a corner, literally, on
that market!  Yay, it only took a decade!

But on a more emotional note, I wonder how long it will take Manhattan
to get to this stage; this prompts feelings of my rerooting in more
progressive markets once again (not *that* feeling again).  I think
right now and for some time into the future, New York City will be as
it has always been with most things in this city as I've seen it;
rather than basically free market and a large amount of affordable
useful merchandise, everything will be either welfare-quality or high
cost and whatever you can afford and/or whatever you can intimidate
someone into getting for you.

Well, perhaps there's hope: yesterday, one of the three POTS lines I
ordered via MFS two or three months ago was put to service!  {It
should be noted that the line turned on with MFS was previously a
NYNEX line in service, and I now have two phone numbers for the same
line (one as the number it was before and one new MFS number); the other 
two
lines are pending NYNEX's installation into my unit, which is pending
what the NYNEX person told me I have to do which is to get a *written*
letter from my landlord (who incidentally hardly knows my language and
hardly knows what an electron is, much less why someone would want to
have more than one phone line) stating that it is OK to install the
new line from the basement to my unit and where; the NYNEX installer
mentioned possibilities of historic building designation codes as
being possible slow-ups, which I find rediculous in this welfare-hotel-
quality gutted building, so I'll have to find out and see}.  

Wow, competition from a competitor that has lower customer
service and is under the thumb of its own competitor (all lines MFS
uses are NYNEX's up to the NYNEX facility, where MFS then colocates
equipment with NYNEX; the only things MFS are the equipment at the
facility and the connections between the MFS equipments where such
calls are routed).  Really, though, this is a pinkynail hold on a
relatively new development in the market, and I can only see this as a
first step to increased competition and eventual quality of service.

At some point, one daydreams, MFS will note the number of customers in
certain neighborhoods to be large enough to run their own lines,
*hopefully* not just traditional (as in century old technology) copper
(hint hint, something thunder and lightning won't be attracted to, not
that this matters in Manhattan where everything is underground).

Actually, my hinting plead brings up a question; while I understand
the bandwidth topology and hierarchy, I don't understand why fiber
wasn't used for the very end of the link as well in the Pacific Bell
installations?  Are fiber cable, tools, and connection equipment still
more expensive than coax cable?

Don't lots of businesses use fiber to their computers in networks
these days?

I'm a bit confused.


- More on MFS Intelenet -

So far all the interactions have been very curteous, I haven't been
put into too many circular impossibilites, and the employees really do
seem to be working hard.

I have programmed myself into using the computer-data line for all my
outbound calls while the modem's off.  Suddenly I get a call on that
line causing me to wonder whether I was going insane because I had it
call-forwarded, and it was an MFS tech checking to make sure the line
was working.  I was duly excited and the MFS tech answered my
procedural questions very nicely (I was asking him what I have to do
and was it necessary for me to brain-pick him, and he basically
answered with the appropriate thing for each question with answers
such as my new MFS number, no, wait, contact landord, and contact
salesperson in a way that seemed quite logical to me).  Anyway, today
as I used the phone for lots of outbound calls, I didn't ever
encounter any problems, and afterwards I realized that I had been
using a new carrier.

Problems:

* I get either fast busy or a recording announcing that I've done
something wrong when I dial these beginning combinations: *70; *77;
*67; *87; *66; *69; 101; 10XXX other than 10440; 1900; 550.  Yes,
that's right, I can't use my selected long distance carrier via 10555
(in my case); I must use MFS.

* CID is not passed consistently.  It works when: I dial direct to a
NYNEX line with CID.  It does not work when I call to a NYNEX line
forwarded to the MFS line forwarded to a NYNEX line (forwarding NYNEX
lines does preserve CID).  My WilTel/LDDS/WorldCom 800 number which
normally either gives ANI information for out-of-service-area calls
and CID information for in-service-area calls via CID always gives OOA
for my calls from my MFS line; I'm guessing that MFS is in the service
area so is consistent with Wiltel/LDDS/WorldCom's silly behavoir of
only doing ANI->CID on out-of-service-area calls, and furthermore

_
                                                                                         

whatever path the long distance call MFS->WilTel/LDDS/Worldcom->NYNEX
takes discards the CID data much as the calls from MFS->NYNEX->MFS-
>NYNEX 
do (as opposed to the MFS->NYNEX calls).  I have not tested calling
NYNEX->MFS->NYNEX, nor do I have CID on my MFS line (yet?  do they
offer this?  They said they do).  Some of this forwarding was via my
Call Forwarding features, and some via the forwarding NYNEX does for
my old phone number to my new MFS line (i.e.  one NYNEX number and one
MFS number, with the MFS number being the "real" number).

Random things:

* 10440 is the MFS LD code, and it doesn't work from NYNEX, only from
MFS (silly since MFS doesn't accept any other code, I tried 10288,
10222, 10333, 10555).

* 1-700-555-4141 works as expected (properly to my knowledge).

* 958 gives the number of MFS line with equivilent tones, clickings
and voices as NYNEX 958 with exception at the end of the announcement
where MFS omits a few fast busy signals (I guess MFS added this
feature at the request of NYNEX which commonly uses 958 on lots of
lines while poking in boxes).

* 1-800-MY-ANI-IS gives the same number as 958.  (No surprise.)

* 72#0114122733XXXX# behaves just the same as local and domestic calls;
I can forward my 800 number to an international number!  Not remotely,
though.  (NYNEX doesn't work this way.)

* Dialing 1 plus any area code works for that area code, including the
same area code, in this case 212; in other words, when using MFS lines
you can just nevermind where you're at, a useful feature.  (NYNEX
doesn't work this way.)

* Long distance calls complete quicker than most other long distance
companies during the evening and night.  During the day they're pretty
slow.  800 numbers all complete very slowly, probably all going
through some common bottlenecking procedure.

My sales rep has yet to call me to finish necessary details, so
perhaps many issues here will be enhanced and worked out properly.
Customer Service told me the sales rep has the final information, but
that what she has on my account for right now is a 15.5 cents per
minute rate at all times for long distance intra and inter state.
They aren't able to tell me what the cost of local calls are (15.5
cents per minute?  free?  A dollar a piece?  Who knows?  Hopefully no
nasty surprises when the bill comes!)  I really hope MFS offers
no-answer-call-forwarding too since NYNEX doesn't.

Further information when I get it ...

------------------------------



I am looking for an X.25 service provider that has  nodes in New York 
City
and worldwide.  
 
 
Adam

------------------------------



On Mon, 14 Aug 95 15:58:17 EDT, Tony Harminc <EL406045@BROWNVM.BROWN.
EDU> wrote:

> I've just spent a vacation week in rural Ontario (Haliburton area),
> and was astonished at the amount of aerial fibre I saw.  I found
> myself watching the poles rather than the road each time we drove
> through a new area, and sure enough those orange tagged loops were
> almost everywhere.  Questions:

By loops, do you mean cable going from poles to houses, or pole to
pole. Pole to pole, with orange tags, sometimes blue or even a spiral
of orange plastic wrapped around it are generally trunk fibers feeding
an CO, OPM, WIC or DMS Urban. Fiber loops to houses are not very
common yet and are rare.

> What is the significance of the orange tags?  I had assumed they just
> marked the cable as fibre rather than copper, so the field people
> would know not to yank too hard on it.  But then I noticed that some
> areas had blue tags.  What do they signify?

They are there, as you state, for us cable splicers or line men to 
make us aware that that cable is fiber. We have to call Repair or 
whatever number is stamped on the tag before we move them. A fiber 
break could cause many custormers to loose service.

> What is the equipment found every 15-20 km?  Typically there is a 
little
> fenced compound with a couple of cabinets beside the road, supplied 
with
> 120V power.  Just repeaters?  As far as I could see, the copper cable
> did not enter the compound, so it presumably was not an SLC type of 
thing.

If you looked around further, you would see copper cables sprouting
from the ground and up a pole somewhere. Unless this is a long
distance fiber which would need reconditioning after a measured
distance.

> How many strands are typically in one of these aerial cables, and what
> data rate do they run at?

Fiber cables can carry a lot of fibers or very few. Its hard to tell 
by the looks of the external cable itself. (There goes my copper 
splicing job! USA here I come!) :)

> What is the topology of these fibre networks?  It looked as though the
> fibre runs were simply interoffice trunking, that is each little town
> big enough to have its own CO/wire centre was connected to each
> neighbouring little town/village.  But I don't see how this explains
> the easy availability of phone lines, e.g. the people next door to the
> cottage we rented had no trouble getting two business lines and one
> residential line, even though they are in an area where 6 and 8 party
> lines were the norm not too many years ago.  This was at the end of a
> little gravel road by the lake in the middle of nowhere, around 10 km
> from the CO in the village.  They told me that an Internet provider is
> promising service in a couple of months.
 
Most telcos in Canada have been trying to get rid of party-lines all
together as quick as possible lately. I think here in Nova Scotia, we
may have one or two communities left to convert. As we kill the gosip
lines, we are placing enough copper to facilitate a modern network
which would explain why the availability of lines in that area.

> How do they install the fibre -- it seems to be bound to the existing
> copper cable with a spiral wrap.  Is there a sort of giant sewing-
machine-
> on-a-truck that just cruises along the road wrapping a huge bobbin of
> nylon around the whole bundle ?  Or do they typically replace the
> copper at the same time ?

Fiber is placed basically the same way copper is placed. We use a
machine called a Lasher. It has lashing wire spools loaded in it and
as it is pulled along, it rotates the spools, lashing the cable to the
strand.

Most copper cables that are replaced by fiber are transformed from
toll to be used as local cables feeding residences. Unless they are
old and or defective beyond reuse.

I start my tan in Jamaica every spring and finish it off all summer 
long on top of telephone poles. No shade up there at all except for 
cloudy days. I hate lightning storms real bad!


    ]\/[ark ]/\[illiston - Freelance Games & Graphics Programmer
    Author of: Two Bit Poker, Lucky Sevens & Ringing Bells.

------------------------------

End of TELECOM Digest V15 #349
******************************

                                                                   
