For instance, if your provider is Verizon, will your pings be recorded by a Cingular tower if it is the
nearest in the clear?
A. (From Mark van der Hoek)
Nope. First of all, the phone doesn't 'ping' anything, it scans intelligently. When your phone is first turned on, it searches for available service according to a list that it stores internally. This list includes the frequency band and operator ID to scan, and it will scan ONLY these for normal service. (911 calls are different.) Your own operator and any authorized roaming partners will be in the list, but nobody else.
When it locates the best signal from list, it locks on, then registers on the network by sending its serial number and mobile number. This registration is sent to ONE site on ONE operator, not to all in the area. This is to let the system know you are available. The system then knows you are there, and where to send paging messages if there is a call for you. It stores this info until you either move to another area, or de-register. (Your mobile will re-register every X minutes. If the system doesn't hear from you for X minutes, it will assume you've turned off your phone and will forget about you until you re-register. X can run from a few minutes to an hour or more. The typical values are about 10-15 minutes.) Other than the system knowing your registration state, and the area you're in (or your last registered location), there is no record kept of this. Every time your registration area changes, the old info is overwritten. No history is kept. If a call comes in while you are de-registered, it will be sent straight to a "treatment," in phone company lingo. This would be voice mail, if you have that service, or a "Customer not available." recording, if you don't. (So, if you call someone and it goes straight to voice mail or a recording, it's usually because they are de-registered.)
A Verizon phone neither knows nor cares about a Cingular site, and vice versa. They use different technologies, and there is no compatibility between them. (CAVEAT: Some Verizon phones and some Cingular phones have analog capability. In this case, the 911 scenario, below, does apply.)
If you had, for example, a Verizon phone and Verizon & Sprint in the same area (same technology), the only time Sprint would ever be aware of your phone might be during a 911 call. If your phone can't find a good signal on a Verizon site, it will use whatever it CAN find (within the same technology), and that carrier is obligated to process the call. So, back to Verizon & Cingular, if you have an analog capable Verizon phone, and no Verizon service is available, Cingular could process that call if they had analog in your area.
]]>These white papers were written by Stephen Macke.
Public Safety Radio Project (PDF)
Public Safety Guide for Acquiring Interoperability Communication Systems (PDF)
The article can be found here: Letter and Number System
It is a must read for any phone number exchange hobbiest.
]]>When keying in a card number, the operator would key in the first 10 digits, then had to pause, until the lower display went dark and the number appeared in the upper display, the operator then keyed the last 4 digits and pressed Start. If the screen went dark, the card was valid and if the keyed number flashed, the card was invalid or miskeyed.
Interesting side note, there was one console that had been modified to handle ship to shore, complete with radio access. Coos Bay and La Grande were very small toll centers, comprised of 24 positions and 12 positions respectively.
They converted to TSD from #3 tollboards back in the early 70s, a full five years before GTE started introducing TSPS. Interesting, these small offices were automated before the GTE network as a whole.
I understand TSD was a stand alone switch and had no remote option and TSPS worked remotely with the originating switches. Also, interesting, the TSD offices could not dial international, they had to call Beaverton Inward (TSPS) and we placed the call for them
Ron Briggs
]]>http://www.candsl.com/~bierman/tops.php
The second one has errors under "Mechanization to help the customer". When he mentions OSPS, he is actually referring to Nortel's Toll Service Desk.
I'm fascinated with the mechanization of operator services from the earliest of times. If anyone has information on PPCS, cordless "A" switchboards utilized with panel systems of the early 1920's, the British CSS1 cordless switchboard from the 1950's, or GTE's verson of the tollboard computer, MECOBS (some call it ACBOS), I would be
ecstatic.
Is it me, or should someone or a group of people write a book on the mechanization of operator services? I would be happy to help and contribute and be a key player. I'm sure all the information we would need is "out there" among private individuals and in public libraries.
Spokane public library has a multiple volume set of books about the history and development of telephony, including a volume devoted to operator services. I don't recall if they were Bell or AT&T publications, they were one or the other. I can remember working graveyard at Beaverton (Oregon) TSPS 20 years ago and finding these fascinating huge old dusty cordboard protocol notebooks in a cabinet.
Lastly, there is a video entitled, "Phantom of the Operator". A history of telephony, women's roles in the industry
and how mechanization affected them. Here's the link for the producer's website, with good information and video clips http://artifactproductions.ca/fantome/en/film/synopsis.htm. I haven't seen the movie yet and would love to own it, but it is VERY expensive.
Just for pHun, have you seen the toll switchboard currently on eBay? It is from the Goleta (Santa Barbara) office, pre 1980 and before being outfitted with MECOBS.
Ron
]]>I was floored when I read your page on women as linemen. That’s because I was probably one of the first, if not the first! I can't believe other women were not linemen at the time. I was never up to date on controversies, however, and I knew most women in my area wouldn't want to work outside in the winter. This was in 1973 or 1974.
I worked for a small telco in northern California, high desert area. I started by transferring into the line crew by seniority from an operator. Yes, we used line cords, but I don't remember them called that. I enjoyed being an operator and had, I think three years in, so I could pretty much choose the hours and schedule that I liked to work. The lineman job came open and it sounded like fun.
I was never afraid of hard work and loved being outdoors. The job was O.K. and I got along with all the guys, and really didn't mind digging all those holes for the tie downs. I remember every time I tried to climb a tree I "scunt" out of it, just couldn't get past that bark I guess. When they let me climb I was doing it in my tennis shoes. The office manager called me in one day and drew a picture of my foot in a sock and sent it in for a pair of boots to be hand made for me. Wow, I sure liked those boots.
]]> I was still "just" learning to climb when some people came up from southern California, and had me put on some hooks and climb up a pole (only a short way) and took pictures of me because I was the "First Woman Telephone Lineman in California." I have the actual pictures they sent me somewhere. They used them for a magazine or something. I would have to dig them out, I had round safety dark purple glasses, like John Lennon style, but the pictures are black and white.I was still very unsure about myself at that time but it didn't take long to acquire the skills. I had the strength and ability to handle the lasher ( I think that's what we called it), which was a big thing for a gal. It ran along the strand and wrapped the phone line to the strand with bailing wire and it weighed about 50 pounds. I didn't get treated any different from any man, except courtesy about bathroom breaks behind the truck! One guy and myself "stepped" 95 poles for one of our jobs for a new area. That takes some explaining:
When I say stepped poles, we were putting in a new line for part of a lake where a lot of people owned property. Every so often a pole had to have steps to climb up and work, (usually for the splicer's I think). One person had to be on one side and the other person on the other side of the pole. One drilled a hole manually, then passed it to the other person, and it seems we both hammered in a step then twisted it like a screw with a special wrench that fit them, until all were securely in place. We worked from the top down to at about nine feet above ground. We did that on 95 of the poles. All the other poles had to be climbed twice as we also installed the phone line and strand. When we put the line up, we put the strand line into a metal gadget that we put on the poles, where it was not tight, so the strand could slide through it. Then one of us used a cable pulley to tighten up the slack. Sometimes it would get stuck in one of the gadgets (I forgot what it was called), and the line would raise too much behind our work. Someone had to be watching this at all times so that didn't happen, because the line could get too close to the power lines and electrocute the one with the pulley. My partner that stepped poles with me was always afraid of being electrocuted, and we would tease him with wires, just saying it was hot so that he would jump. Sadly that's what killed him several years after I left.
I think I was not quite 21 years old in 1974 when all this happened. I have a lot of great memories about working on the line crew and wouldn't change it for anything! I also have some bad ones, but hey it was the seventies. Some of the good ones are as follows. I was followed by a bobcat when I walked a line in snowshoes by myself (creepy feeling). We took out a line that was mounted on trees by springs. When we were changing and putting in insulators one day I was shocked by an old style open wire line where the people had to turn the phone handle to ring the operator to get connected. I had lots of fun especially playing cards when it rained. Thanks for letting me share the memories. J.S.
Read more about this topic: http://www.privateline.com/OSP/women.html
]]>Happy searching.
]]>We measure radio emissions by cycles per second or hertz. Imagine a rock thrown into a pond. Waves radiate from the point of impact. Similarly, audible waves radiate from us as we speak, as air is compressed or displaced by sound. Human speech lies principally between 100 and 250 hertz. Our hearing range extends to roughly 20,000 hertz. Musically speaking, middle “C” on the piano is at 261 hertz.
Radio transmissions are high above all of this, in the hundreds of thousands and millions of cycles per second. Some examples are an A.M. radio station signal at 560,000 hertz, an F.M. station broadcasting at 90,300,000 hertz, and a cellular telephone transmitting at 890,450,000 hertz. In actual practice, we shorten these long numbers by using (and then abbreviating) the words kilohertz and megahertz. A kilohertz is a thousand cycles per second, a megahertz a million. The three figures noted would thus be 560 KHz, 90.3 MHz, and 890.450 MHz respectively. These numbers are known as frequencies. And nearly every frequency in the radio spectrum is assigned a use.
In the United States the Federal Communications Commission assigns and administers non-Federal radio spectrum. Cellular radio, satellite, amateur radio, land mobile (two-way business radio), and broadcasting, are some of the scores of services used by tens of millions of people to do business and to communicate. FCC radio-frequency allocations also license spectrum for emergency services. With users increasing but radio spectrum remaining fixed, there is a tremendous need to use bandwidth efficiently. More later . . .
]]>Tom,
I came across an interesting citation today. It seems that in 1907 the King Chulalongkorn of Siam was on a visit to Norway. As a part of his travel report there is the following discussion of the potential for what we now call Mobile telephony.
"In the evening they returned to Notodden, and during dinner the king talked with Birkeland (one of the founders of the company Norsk Hydro) about the mysteries of electricity. He heard, among other things about Birkeland's idea about an electrical cannon and an idea about making rain. He also heard that Hydro had inventions and plans on telegraphic communication without wires or cables, but this project was not being pursued. As a result of this, the prophetically king wrote "It is not daring to predict that in the future there might be a portable telephone like a small personal watch. When you want to talk with someone, you can just talk into the watch and then put your ear against it to hear what the other person has said."
The Original Norwegian is: at http://www.almanakken.uio.no/temaartikler/norgesreise_2007b.html
He may have been thinking of crystal radios since it was only about this time that vacuum tubes were being developed by Fleming and De Forest in the US.
]]>It was sold to Alcatel in the 1980's which then discontinued the North Electric name. It's last product was the DSS1210 digital switch. I worked as an installer for North Electric from 1966 thru 1971.
]]>At that time, a powerful Democratic machine that influenced every aspect of life in the city governed Boston. Not surprisingly, its leaders took an interest in the code Boston would be assigned under the new numbering system. Telephones in the 1940s generally had a rotary dial. A premise governing the designation of three-digit area codes-- to a state, or to regions within a state-- was that densely populated areas where the incoming call volume was heavy should have mostly low numbers (meaning ones high up on the rotary dial, requiring less time to execute) while rural areas—ones that received fewer calls—should be assigned mostly higher numbers (farther down on the dial). The aim was to save time for the largest number of customers. Thus, New York City earned a 2-1-2 designation, while rural Maine received a 2-0-7 code. Because apportionment principal seemed rational, it generated relatively little contention in most states and cities as the codes were assigned.
Not so in Boston. There the Democratic machine thought the prospective apportionment would diminish their city. If the national pattern were followed, Boston residents would be forced to dial high numbers when placing calls to the western (and generally Republican) parts of Massachusetts. Meanwhile, callers to Boston from those western regions would enjoy the benefit of using lower numbers. City politicians moved to avert that disaster. In 1948
Democrats had won control of the state legislature for the first time in history, providing the city machine with even greater clout. Led by Mayor John Hynes, protests were made to New England Telephone and through it to AT&T. After negotiations, Boston gained an exception to the national plan, earning a 6-1-7 area code (high for a large city), and western Massachusetts received a lower 4-1-3. Massachusetts has added several more area codes in the decades since 1950 but the two original ones remain, examples that politics sometimes trumps technology.
Kenneth T. Palmer
Kittery Point, ME
My name is Don Capehart, I live in Corsicana,Texas and I own a Telephone and Telecommunications Collection that occupies about 10,000 square feet.
We have a history of communications that dates back to the 1880s. There are approximately 2,000 items on display and another 200,000 in storage that has been inventoried. We also have several thousand parts not included in the inventory.
I am trying to find out the best way to sell and relocate this collection, due to the health of both my wife and myself. We realize that this collection may not fit with the type of investments and collections that you deal with, but we are hoping you may be able to direct us to someone that can help.
The collection needs to be housed somewhere where it can be appreciated. Due to the extent of the collection it could be divided into smaller collections.
You may view the website at http://www.telephonemuseum.info/
If you can offer us any advice on how to sell our collection, please let me know.
My family and I would appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Don and Rita Capehart
Call records do contain the information on the FIRST site to handle the call, and the LAST site. To be more precise, most sites are divided into SECTORS, each of which serves a different geographical area. The first and last serving site AND sector is recorded on the billing record by the SWITCH. Switches are the central computer that controls the network, essentially. It is the switch that records the call
information.
One thing to be aware of - when you talk to someone at customer service OR the legal compliance department (whatever they call it), please remember, these folks are NOT technical people, but many THINK they are. They are not a reliable source of technical information. I've acted as expert witness a few times, and found that these people can often be quite pompous and idiotic. Part of their job is to shield the engineering departments from having to respond to endless questions, which can take up quite a bit of time. This is understandable, but it can result in them giving out wrong information, because they get on the phone with someone in engineering, and don't understand what is told them. So, they 'fill in' the gaps of their understanding, thus garbling the message. For example, the explanation you sent me from this is nonsense. I can only GUESS what was originally meant by the engineering department, now that it's been filtered through these folks.
Your best bet is to have a subpoena issued when you need the information. THEN the information should come - in writing - from the engineering folks. If you are able to get a subpoena issued, make sure that it requests information from a qualified engineer.
Regards,
Mark
------------------
From R.C. Levine
There is no billing-related reason to keep a record of every cell or sector that a wireless handset passed through during a call. In the less usual instance of an inter-city handover during the call, the last cell in system A used before the handover, and the first cell used in system B immediately after the handover are in the individual billing station detail or automatic message accounting data (from system A and B respectively), but not other cells. I agree with Mark that you are not likely to find the history of every cell in billing data.
All cellular switches that I am familiar with (Lucent, Nortel, Ericsson and Motorola) have a capability that may be able to help you to a degree. These switches have the optional capability to record detailed call "history" including all sorts of switching related data (typically on hard disk) during a call. This can include the time and the identification numbers of the two cells involved in every handover within the call, as well as other technical information about the
condition of the radio channel (e. g., signal strength, digital bit error rate). This is provided by the manufacturer so the service provider's technical people can debug problems with radio coverage at the boundary between cells, etc. The problem is that this data only exists for past calls if the technicians had the history capture software running for that call, and furthermore if they preserved that information up to the present day.
There is also another aspect that occurs in legal cases involving cellphone: the fact that a call is being handled by one particular sector of a particular cell at a certain time does not indicate physical location with a degree of accuracy suitable for locating the wireless handset precisely. The boundaries of the sectors/cells are inherently a
little "fuzzy" -- that is to say that, for various reasons, the handover will not always occur at exactly the same spot on the path of a subscriber who is moving from one cell into another. (That is why the FCC has pressed for new and more accurate radio-location methods to facilitate finding a subscriber in distress who has made a 911 call.) To be more comprehensive I should note that in some cases the particular geography of certain cell boundaries may allow a much more accurate location to be correctly inferred. For example, consider a city with a river running through it, and only one bridge crossing the river in a region where two cells on opposite sides of the river have a common boundary approximately lying along the centerline of the river. (That is the preferred way to configure two cells on both banks of a river.) In this geographical situation, we can infer that when the subscriber was handed over from an earlier cell on one side of the river to a later cell on the opposite side, that he must have crossed via the bridge (in contrast to swimming....),
Also, some service providers have various types of FCC mandated locating facilities in place ranging from multi=antenna triangulation capability (moderate but not good accuracy) up to having certain subscribers' handsets incorporate a GPS satellite receiver and then periodically reporting their latitude, longitude and altitude above sea level (but this is currently somewhat rare, may not report anything when the handset is in a bad location for GPS radio reception like on a downtown sidewalk between tall buildings, the technicians may not have recorded cell history for that call, and they may not have saved it, etc.) [GPS=global positioning system, satellite navigation]
Another thing that you may wish to consider in conjunction with the presentation of a cell identification number is to present evidence from experts and cellular service providers own technical people regarding the radio coverage area of each cell and the margin of accuracy with which one can assert that a particular handset is within the nominal cell or sector coverage area. Most wireless systems have a sizable technical staff dedicated to continually
patrolling the streets and pedestrian areas to prepare geo.
It seems that everyone wants access to the radio
spectrum. The FCC is being pressured from every
imaginable quarter -- the wireless digital folks in
particular -- to free up more Megahertz. The gold
rush is not being driven by attorneys or engineers,
but by politicians and the investment community. The
electromagnetic spectrum is destined to become a
SHARED resource in most instances, broadcast bands
included, FAA bands probably excluded for now.
Tom Farley back again. Go to CGC's site sometime and
take a look around. Well worth your time. Subscribe,
too, to their free newsletter. Excellent, pithy
writing.