Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: john@zygot.ati.com (John Higdon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Prefix '520' For Los Angeles Radio Stations Message-ID:Date: 25 Sep 89 07:04:41 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Organization: Green Hills and Cows Lines: 64 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 406, message 5 of 12 In article , joe@mojave.ati.com (Joe Talbot) writes: > Stations often are forced to pay foreign exchange and milage charges > just to get service, because that service MUST be on a choke system. The three stations I work with that have choke prefixes do not pay any mileage. One simply because the 575 is served out of AXminster, their local office. The other two had previously been served out of AXminster but moved about a half-mile over the line into ALpine. An appropriate tear here and an "offer" for some Pac*Bell editorializing there, and the charges magically vanished. I understand that another station in town, served out of 95 Almaden, has a bunch of 575 lines used for some promotion and they also do not pay any mileage. I'm not sure why (but there is someone on this system who *does* know--hint, hint.) Which reminds me of the stormy beginnings of the choke network in the SF Bay Area. (Oh no, here comes another story, Martha!) It was about 1966 and one of the rock 'n roll AM stations discovered contests (really give-aways). Technicians in the 95 Almaden office were noticing these instantaneous overloads of the trunks and the crossbar switching equipment. In 1966 it was ALL crossbar. It didn't take long to determine who was the culprit. Phone company people were faced with a problem. Obviously they couldn't design the network to handle that peak demand on an occasional basis, and yet they couldn't be faced with periodic shutdowns that also prevented emergency calls from being placed. One of the suggestions was to tell the radio station that they couldn't "abuse their telephone service" in that manner any longer upon pain of disconnection. The radio station couldn't see the problem. "We only have four lines for the contest. How can we possibly be causing any trouble?" Of course, they had no idea of the trouble caused when hundreds of calls were directed at one number. Trunks would become jammed with busy signals (or reorders when the busy tone trunks would fill up) and normal calls would be blocked. Looking at the problem, they decided upon creating a special exchange that would have limited trunking and not share trunks with any other prefix. That way, the special exchange could busy out without affecting any other service. Hence was born the choke network. But this is not the end of the story. In 1972, some DJ at the big 50,000 watt rocker "discovered" how the choke network worked. He was furious to find out that callers could actually be blocked from calling him. He created a major stink which spread to other radio stations and ended up with representatives from Pacific Telephone and all the area stations in a conference. The long and the short of it was that PacTel insisted that it had created the choke network as a "service" to the stations, explaining that the only alternative was "contest prohibition". They made their point, the DJ was put in his place, and as an offering of good will, the area engineers were treated to a grand tour of 95 Almaden, the downtown office. (For you locals, the DJ was Tom Campbell, who hosted "KLOK Talk", where this issue came up.) Even so, from time to time, some DJ suddenly discovers that when he dials the request lines from an office extension, it's busy (reorder) and no request lines are in use. I have a canned explantion that usually calms him/her down. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !