Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!KL.SRI.COM!MYERSTON
From: MYERSTON@KL.SRI.COM (HECTOR MYERSTON)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Various
Message-ID: <12401684736.24.MYERSTON@KL.SRI.COM>
Date: 27 May 88 16:08:54 GMT
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This is a reply to various items in Volume 8 Issue 87
o  (For Phil Damper re: "The Lady").  The lady in all of the old Bell System
announcements is from Atlanta and has surfaced from time to time on talk 
shows etc.  Apparently she is not exclusive as many other vendors such as
Voice Mail companies use her as well.
o  (For Barry Nelson re: "Clicks").  It is not strange that calls from 
Italy to New York and San Francisco are priced the same since the reverse
is also true!.  We often find people routing calls over private facilities
to get "closer" (ie routing Europe calls from the West Coast to NYC), the
cost of International Calls is not dependent on where (in the US) it enters
the system.
o  (For Will Martin re: Auto Answer).  The feature works one-way only.  You
can >answer< the phone by yelling at it, you cannot >initiate< a call that
way.  Thus background noise etc is a problem only while the call is ringing.
Panasonic has the feature on intercom calls on their KSUs and it works OK.
o  (For John Gruber re:V&H).  Calls are priced by a system called CAMA, 
Centralized Automatic Message Accounting.  Private lines are priced by 
Rate Elements one of which is the IOC or inter-office channel.  V&H are
used to figure IOC mileage in a straight-forward way (The square root of
one tenth the sum of the differences squared).  MTS calls, on the other
hand, use a more complicated algorithm still based on the V&H but biased
towards charging more proportionally for short distances.  I am sure it
is spelled out in the MTS tariff.  I have it in Datapro Reports on Telecom
but it is to complicated to detail here.  If you can't find it locally let
me now.  (Report TC23-003-108).  
+Hector+
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