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May 23, 2004
Site update
This week I'll be converting dozens of telecomwriting.com pages into privateline.com pages. I started this process last December but never completed the project. With some work and luck my site will soon be much more uniform looking and easier to use.
More musings on hiring in the wireless trade
Tom,
I agree mostly with what Mark said below, particularly with the ramp up after the long depression in the industry. The one area where I might disagree is working for vendors. Their business is turning around, too, but my experience is that they hire on a short term basis. Watch out.
When projects are terminated, when a vendor runs out of money, or a merger takes place, project engineers and consultants are the first to go. Do you want to work in a part of wireless that does this? As a long term, small size consultant, I would not take a contract with most of the vendors.
Projects are rarely completed and smaller vendors are the ones who end up footing the bill. That's because we spend to get ready for their projects and then most often have to wait until they are ready. And wait. And wait. Add in the poor financial status of many companies due to the recent depression and I doubt I would work for a vendor if longevity was a goal.
Best, Ken
Ken Schmidt (internal link)
May 22, 2004
Switchroom layout
Q. Do you have a photograph of a modern central office switchroom?
A. No. How about a diagram instead? The Nortel DMS-100 SuperNode is an older design but still the most widely used telephone switching system in North America. I can't explain all the acronyms but here are some of them:
I0E: Input/Output equipment frame, containing a tape drive, frame supervisory panel, disk drive, and an input/output controller.
LCE: Line concentrating equipment. LCE frame contain line concentrating modules which in turn house line cards.
MAP: Maintenance and Administration Position
PM: Peripheral Module. The interface between the switch and the outside world. All PMs terminate customer lines.
May 21, 2004
Advice for grads
Q. Dear Mark. I just got my degree in a wireless related field. Now what?
A. (From Mark van der Hoek, Senior RF Engineer)
Congratulations. You're now in an interesting business with great potential. The industry is slowly beginning to recover from a deep slump, and your job prospects are better now than they were a year ago.
There are three main types of employers in the cellular industry:
1. The carriers, like Sprint, Verizon, or Cingular. These are stable jobs (well, except for Sprint -- they lay off, re-hire, lay off, re-hire, repeat.) and decent pay, with good training for the most part.
2. The vendors, the people that supply equipment, like Nortel, Lucent, Ericsson, and so on. Depending on what part of their company you work for, the jobs are stable or not. Some of the vendor's people do a lot of traveling from project to project. Good pay, lots of long hours, and no home life. If you're in their R&D or manufacturing side, then it's stable and decent pay.
3. Consulting firms. These range from large companies with over 1000 engineers, to Mom & Pop shops with just a few engineers. Decent pay, but probably not as good as choice number 1 or 2. Oh, lots of travel, and no home life. Training is minimal, mostly on the job. This used to be where the big bucks could be made. NOT ANYMORE. But if you like to travel, this is the life for you. Warning: It can be difficult to get out of this into working for a carrier or vendor. Make a firm decision beforehand to get into consulting, get some experience, make contacts, and then get out. People tend to get trapped in the consulting world.
May 20, 2004
It's fascinating how new technology often solves one problem while creating another:
Air Force Radios Jam Garage Door Openers
The Associated Press (All rights reserved)
EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. - During testing last week of the $5.5 million two-way radio system at Eglin, homeowners in Niceville, Valparaiso and the Crestview area reported that their garage door openers failed to work.
Air Force officials said Tuesday the contractor, Motorola Inc., will try to minimize the problem. Technicians will run the system at slightly different frequencies from those used by garage door openers when another test is conducted Friday through Monday.
"I want my garage door opener to work, too," said Col. Russell F. Miller, commander of the 96th Communication Group.
Lauren Van Wazer, a spokeswoman for the Federal Communication Commission, said if the Air Force has been running the system within its licensed frequencies -- the Air Force said it has -- then users of garage door openers may have to change theirs.
A similar radio system has been requested for Pensacola Naval Air Station and other nearby installations, according to a Navy spokesman.
May 19, 2004 (continued from the 18th)
More swimming in a shallow pool
Q. What's the future of the ring, busy signal, and dial tone?
A. They'll continue but their role will diminish. Today, wireless telephones don't use dial tone, busy signals don't exist with voice mail, and some calls connect with no ring heard.
Siemens introduced dial tone to the public switched telephone network in Germany in 1908. It's still useful for landline telephones. You hear dial tone only when switching equipment can take your call. No dial tone, no call. That's different than wireless. Landline connections proceed in real time as we dial, wireless calls proceed after we dial. Calls get set up once you hit "Send", not before. Get it? You don't need a dial tone, in other words, since no connection exists before you dial. Unlike a landline telephone, there is no network yet to monitor. Mark van der Hoek (internal link) comments:
"In the early days of cellular phones, the lack of dial tone was confusing to many customers. Two manufacturers, E.F. Johnson and NEC, provided fake dial tone for their cellular phones. As long as the cellphone could lock onto a control channel, the phone produced dial tone in the earpiece. If the phone couldn't find the network no dial tone would be generated. Personally, I'd like to see dial tone go the way of the dodo bird, and I think it's happening. Just this weekend I used a Radio Shack cordless phone that allowed the user to dial the entire number, make corrections if needed, and THEN engage the "TALK" button to dial the numbers. No dial tone was heard until the TALK button was pressed. As soon as dial tone was detected, the digits were sent. In my opinon, ALL phones should operate this way."
I disagree. I like more audible feedback from machines than less. I like keys that go click and buttons that go beep. It would be interesting to see what the man/machine interface studies say about this. But what about the busy signal and the ring tone?
Busy signals no longer happen when you call someone with voice mail. You either connect in real time or you leave a message. Around 1996 the New Brunswick Telephone Company or NBTel, upgraded their switches for that small Canadian province. Every customer was then given voice mail as part of their basic telephone service. No more busy signals when you call New Brunswick. If stateside telephone companies weren't already selling voice mail as an add on service, instead of including it as NBTel, then busy signals would decrease even further. Dr. Richard Ling, industrial sociologist (internal link), comments:
"The social impacts of the dial and busy tones are somewhat minimal compared to other telephonic developments. For me, the big changes have been the mobility allowed by the mobile phone, and the ability to get information over long distances, which was first introduced by telegraphy and then further developed by telephony."
"The change from a dial tone to the system used in mobile phones (where you can see the signal strength and network connection) seems to be along the lines of the change from manual to automatic transmissions. That is, the big revolution was already underway and the smaller innovation facilitated it to some degree."
"The same is, to some degree, true of the busy signal. The rise of answering services and forwarding of calls has had some impacts. In terms of answering machines, the caller can at least to some degree initiate the contact and give some type of message. It also partially places the onus on the person being called to respond and perhaps try to call back the original caller. In other words the communication is, at some level, initiated. When one is met with a busy signal then that is basically a dead end."
The dial tone, busy tone, and ring are certainly adjuncts, temporary companions on our telephonic journey. These progress tones mark a network's ability to connect a call, but by themselves they do little, it is the content and now mobility in telephony, as Ling notes, that matters. What we communicate after a connection is made. Still, little is more frustrating than an endless busy signal or a telephone that rings on forever.
We all know the endless busy signal. In very bad cases we'd wonder if our friend took the phone off the hook, was just talking for hours, or was lying incapacitated on the floor. Getting the operator to check the line is embarrassing and expensive but I think we've all done it, especially in an emergency when we had to get a call through.
The endless ring is another matter. No options here, no possible operator intervention. In many cases today, though, you don't hear a ring if you are connected. You simply hear the other party picking up. I don't know what produces a ring at one time, and not at another. Limited rings are also quite common, a telco or business may give you a certain amount of rings and then "busy you out", dropping your call. They want to restrict your call attempts (and thus time) on their networks. The instant connection and limited ring both forecast a decreasing use for the ring. But this is the ring you hear when you call. What about the ring the caller hears?
The telephone is first and foremost an audio device, admittedly of low bandwidth, and of low fidelity. It's keypad and ringer don't produce the best tones. But look at the popularity with mobiles of downloadable ring tones. And when touch tone phones came out there were books on how to play songs on the DTMF keypads. I am a little surprised mobiles aren't fixed up now so they can play different songs without dialing through. Try the song below, It's not Creed, but it will do as an example:
NB: (-) Dashes are held notes (,) Commas are spaces
Ode to Joy
669##96544566-55-
669##96544565-44-
5564569645696545#
669##96544565-44-
May 17, 2004
Long time Bell System man J.R. Snyder Jr. has been contributing many articles on operator services to this site and I've been quite busy converting his writing to web pages. Click here for a list of his articles and related pages. This work isn't finished and the pages posted contain bad formatting, a few dead links, and some other minor errors. But I have taken so long to get this information on-line that I wanted to get the process started. Hang in there with us over the next week while we correct and make pretty this important contribution to telephone history.
Click for a larger image
Tom:
The photo of Cleveland's TSPS above was a slightly different version of the original TSPS that was put into New Jersey. The final product omitted the keys to the left of the multileaf file because the function those keys served had been incorporated into the primary functions to the right of the multileaf.
I suppose I should write an operators' perspective of how TSPS radically changed our call handling and created a new operator services culture. Including the mechanics of operating the console that were similiar and those that were different from the cord switchboard.
You know that Northern Electric actually beat Western Electric to the punch in putting in trial consoles in Greenwood, South Carolina and Greenville, Ohio but they were much less automatic and still required a lot of operator "ticketing and timing"?
May 8, 2004
It's hard to concentrate on my writing when I run across stuff like this. This is an AT&T ad circa 1976. Let's see, let's sell our new phone by using a dead cheetah. Nothing sells like a model lolling on top of an endangered species. Yeah, that will work. Poor guy, he died for telephony.
Click to enlarge
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