Additional NPA Overlay to Toronto ON 416/647 ?? [telecom]

Sorry, I should have said a switch can try multiple routes if the preferred route isn't available, the 4XB had some thing that shuffled punchcards to try routes, and had some ability to customize by time of day. I can't dig it up now, but I've read stuff about e.g. routing calls in the morning from Chicago to New York via Denver and Dallas since it's earlier in Denver so it's not as busy yet.

Compelled signalling assumed SxS style incremental decoding and routing, which was fine in Europe where the countries were small and the number of tandem routes, and particular routes between countries was also small.

R's, John

Usually the # key will end the timing.

One example mentioned in a Bell System publication--probably the Bell Labs Record and said to be the first attempt to do this--was when the Wisconsin National Guard went to summer camp in, I believe, Washington state. All the soldiers headed for the phones in the evening to call home, and backing up all HU routes to first, then backing up into the Sacramento Sectional (?) center and degrading service all along the Pacific coast. Someone had the idea of, after a certain hour in the evening, making White Plains the first choice after the HU direct trunks (not many of those from Washington state to Milwaukee). By that time traffic was way down to and from the East, so Seattle (or wherever the center was)-White Plains trunks were very lightly loaded. Same thing for the White Plains-Milwaukee direct trunks, and also the White Plains-Norway direct trunks that would be the final route from White Plains to Milwaukee. Yes, changing the punched metal cards. It pretty well solved the problem, and similar changes became almost routine for special events. Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com

Of course. But that's still significantly different from what we're used to ("dial - ring").

Greetings Marc

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-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " |

People who use mobile phones would probably disagree with you.

R's, John

It's still a horror scenario which I am glad that [we] were able to avoid.

Grüße Marc

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-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " |

Although domestic dialing in the U.S. and Canada is a fixed-number system, international dialing is not. So, since the inception of direct international dialing use of the "#" eliminates the 5-second ambiguity period.

At least for me, it's a significant difference whether I'm using a landline phone and a mobile, and I am comfortable with the mobile behaving differently than the landline.

But I might not be a good example since I converted my landline to ISDN in 1996 and since then lost familiarity with the behavior of an analog landline.

With ISDN, you can either dial as with a landline (pickup, dial, hear the calling tone after the number was completely dialled), but you can also dial before picking up and usually hear the calling tone before the received reached your ear.

Greetings Marc

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-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " |

Generally, enough knowledge of international dialing is built into the local "class 5" switch so neither timing nor "#" is required. I can't remember when I last needed to use the "#" to terminate dialing phone number.

Of course, this may just say something about who I call and/or where I call from. (These days, typically European business or mobile numbers from a BellSouth (er, AT&T) centrex line).

Mike

I don't agree.

While nearly no cell phone user cares about where the cell phone number is rated to (which could mean distance-based charges on an incoming caller's local calling plan), generally they care about area code, especially in situations in which 7 digit home NPA dialing exists.

If proper care were taken with numbering space, I don't believe for a moment that Toronto requires three area codes, any more than I believe that the Chicago area requires (hold the phone while I use both fingers and toes to count) eleven area codes. Yes, we have eleven, up from the original two, remembering that a good number of exchanges in NPA 815 were part of the Chicago LATA and included in some local rate plans. NPA 464 has been open since 1999 but unassigned, awaiting exhaustion of NPA 708.

Influenced by a comment Linc Madison made years ago, proper conservation of numbering space would mean that line number that requires rating to a particular exchange would be assigned from a common pool of line numbers available to any telephone company with a physical presence in that exchange. The technology to route calls to any phone company is the basis of number portability, so why isn't it being used to conserve numbers?

Telephone numbers that don't require ratings should be assigned from common pools of numbers in non-geographical area codes.

Sorry, David, but I sure don't see how the old system wasn't more rational, if low population density areas used shorter telephone numbers.

Totally irrational is the UK dialing plan in which everyone is required to use a dialing prefix to call domestically, with the dialing prefix stated as part of the telephone number, confusing us calling internationally who would never use the dialing prefix.

VoIP calls are unswitched, so the excuse that a time out costs 10s of millions of dollars annually of dialing register time in switches across the NANP isn't applicable.

If the VoIP provider thinks it costs money, then all it has to do is allow a "send" sequence, like the # key that those of us dialing internationally from the NANP to a country outside the NANP would expect to use to avoid the timeout.

FYI, it's fairly common for VoIP phones to use # as a send key. Mine does.

R's, John

In MD, 10D has nothing to do with toll. All toll calls must be 11D. (Local calls can be dialed with 10 or 11D.)

Please retain the attribution lines.

I wasn't discussing dialing plans that included toll alerts. (My area has never had toll-alerting dialing plans.) I'm stating that a typical cell phone subscriber would request telephone number assignment from a particular area code without concern for rating point, a concept he won't even be aware of applying to inbound calls to cell phones.

Depending on local calling plans available, a call to a cell phone in the home area code could very well include distance-rated charges because the rating point assigned to the cell phone could be a great distance from the caller's exchange, even though it's a home area code call.

Local calls in my area, at various times, depending on the calling plan, some calls were time-and-distance rated as toll calls, on the state-wide long distance calling schedule, even though on other calling plans they could have been time-and-distance rated as measured service, a cheaper rating plan that never applied to (what would eventually be called) in-state interLATA calls. On still other plans, the same local call could be included in the pre-paid area. In the mid '80's, we went to another plan for local calls that changed everyone's rates in that calls within

When we got "competition" for "local toll", generally, calls within 15 miles were untimed or prepaid (there was a choice), and calls beyond were rated on the schedule of the carrier one selected.

All Chicago area codes include points that are more than 15 miles in between so there's great potential for calls to home area code cell phones to have distance charges under all the scenarios I described. But a cell phone subscriber won't likely be aware of it and won't request a cell phone number assigned to a rating point that could avoid distance charges for some of his inbound callers, like family members.

Well, not until he saw his next residential phone bill.

Depends where you are. Where I live, people are quite aware of the difference between an Ithaca and a Binghamton number. They're both

In New Jersey, people know Trenton vs. Atlantic City numbers for the same reason, again no toll alerting but inter-LATA toll.

R's, John