TELECOM Digest     Mon, 21 May 2007 08:25:00 EDT    Volume 26 : Issue 140

Inside This Issue:                             Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Clear Channel Launches Mobile Texting Program (Sue Zeidler, Reuters)
    AT&T Steps up Cingular Rebranding Ahead of iPhone (Reuters News Wire)
    Re: Clean Technology Bigger than Internet Claims Bill Joy (Dave Garland)
    Re: Train Passengers Asked to Get out and Push Stalled Train (T)
    Re: Train Passengers Asked to Get out and Push Stalled Train (Lisa Hancock)
    Re: Telephone Dialing in Old Movies (Fred Atkinson)
    Re: Telephone Dialing in Old Movies, Police Radio (harold@hallikainen.com)
    Re: Telephone Dialing in Old Movies (Neal McLain)

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Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 06:07:09 -0500
From: Sue Zeidler <reuters@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: Clear Channel Launches Mobile Texting Program


By Sue Zeidler

Clear Channel Communications Inc. launched on Monday a free mobile
program that enables listeners to text-message radio stations from
their cell phones to make song requests, get real-time traffic reports
and access other information.

The launch follows a test in September of a $2.99-per-month mobile
program with Cingular Wireless that allowed listeners of Top 40 New
York station, Z100, to stream live broadcasts, listen to podcasts of
interviews, access playlists, get real-time traffic reports and send
song requests to disc jockeys via text-messaging.

But the leading radio operator said the test with Cingular, AT&T
Inc.'s wireless unit that is being rebranded as AT&T, had been
completed and was not going forward.

Clear Channel said it was now focusing on a free model that does not
involve any streamed broadcasts but instead focuses on text-messaging
capabilities.

People with Cingular phones will be able to participate in the latest
offering if they have phones that can provide text messaging or SMS
(short message service).

"Giving users an individualized, on-demand experience will strengthen
listeners' connection with their favorite radio stations," said John
Hogan, chief executive officer of Clear Channel Radio.

Clear Channel's new mobile program launch involves five New York radio
stations and it plans to launch similar programs on up to 100 more
stations by the end of 2008, beginning with stations in Salt Lake City
and St. Louis in the next 60 days.

The advertising-supported programs are available via most SMS
carriers, while more advanced phones will be able to access the
services via WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) with rich graphics
and an enhanced user interface.

Hogan would not disclose specific terms of the advertising deals, but
said it was a straightforward model.

"People will pay us for the number of people we are able to reach," he
said. "This platform will add a level of accountability and
credibility," he said.

Users can send text messages to studios, take part in contests, make
requests and dedications, and view the last 10 songs played. They can
also check current traffic conditions, test their knowledge with
station specific trivia, and participate in opinion polls.

Many content providers are jumping into the mobile industry. The
Yankee Group consultancy has said it expects the mobile advertising
market to more than quadruple to $275 million in 2007 and reach $2.2
billion in 2010. The market was about $60 million 2006.


Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited.

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------------------------------

Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 06:09:17 -0500
From: Reuters News Wire <reuters@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: AT&T Steps up Cingular Rebranding Ahead of iPhone


Top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc. said it will step up its rebranding
campaign at Cingular wireless stores, seeking to raise AT&T's profile
ahead of the launch of Apple Inc.'s iPhone.

The company will replace the Cingular name with AT&T in the interiors
of its 1,800 shops on Monday, ahead of the iPhone launch in late June.

AT&T acquired BellSouth Corp. last year, a move that consolidated its
ownership of the two companies' wireless joint venture, Cingular,
which is being rebranded as AT&T.

"The iPhone is one of the most anticipated handsets ever in the
wireless industry, and we want to make sure that every drop of equity
from the iPhone accrues to the AT&T brand," AT&T spokesman Michael Coe
said.

"We want to be as far along as possible with our rebranding in advance
of the launch of the iPhone."

AT&T, however, said it will keep the exterior signs of most of the
stores unchanged for now, showing it would take time to dismantle the
well-recognized wireless brand.

The rebranding is expected to take a year or so, although AT&T has not
set a deadline. The company has said it will keep an eye on consumer
surveys to assess the public's recognition of AT&T as a wireless
provider.

"Our branding campaign is performing above projected levels, we are
ahead of schedule, and customer response has been very positive,"
Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson said in a statement.

AT&T said it was launching a new advertising campaign with the
tagline: "Your world is wireless. AT&T is wireless."

Copyright 2007 Reuters Limited.

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new
articles daily. And, discuss this and other topics in our forum at
http://telecom-digest.org/forum (or)
http://telecom-digest.org/chat/index.html

For more news and headlines, please go to:
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/technews.html  (or)
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/internet-news.html

------------------------------

From: Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com>
Subject: Re: Clean Technology Bigger than Internet Claims Bill Joy
Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 07:05:44 +0000
Organization: Wizard Information


It was a dark and stormy night when Wesrock@aol.com wrote:

> There is no place in the world where public passenger transportation
> does not require a subsidy; in most cases, outright operation by a
> governmental entity.

> Also, rail transit systems are tremendously expensive to build in
> established cities.

All true.  But exactly the same is true of automobile-centered
transportation.  User fees (gas tax and tolls) pay for only a small
fraction of the cost of construction, maintenance, and operation of
highways, roads, streets.  And for the total cost, you need to add on
top of that the cost to users for purchase, maintenance, and operation
of the vehicles.

Dave

------------------------------

From: T <nospam.kd1s@cox.nospam.net>
Subject: Re: Train Passengers Asked to Get out and Push Stalled Train
Organization: The Ace Tomato and Cement Company
Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 07:37:19 -0400


In article <telecom26.139.6@telecom-digest.org>, 
nospam.kd1s@cox.nospam.net says:

> In article <telecom26.138.10@telecom-digest.org>> says:

> Interestingly I never knew there was so much rail freight until we moved 
> into our new offices. Huge P&W freighters carrying lumber, oil, etc. go 
> through several times a day. 

>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: CTA's telephone system used the third
>> rail for the telephone communications on the trains. Between the
>> headquarter's switchboard and the individual stations, they used
>> leased lines from Illinois Bell. 

>> A bit of history for you to consider: The _original_ train routes
>> (Jackson Park Elevated Line, Lake Street Elevated Company, Chicago
>> Rapid Transit Company, The Union Loop Elevated Line, Metropolitan Rail
>> and others) and the _original_ bus and street car companies (Boulevard
>> Bus, Chicago Surface Lines and others) were all privately owned
>> companies. In 1932, Chicago Rapid Transit Company went into
>> receivership and bankruptcy when they were unable to pay their
>> _electric_ bill to the Chicago Edison Company, our electric supplier
>> at the time. A man named Samuel Insull was the president of Chicago
>> Rapid Transit and on the board of Edison. On the day Edison was set to
>> cut off the power to the rapid transit line, Insull cut a deal for
>> them. Chicago Edison would loan the money needed to Chicago Rapid
>> Transit, in the form of fifty year bonds. I guess they figured fifty
>> years hence (1982) was a long time away, why worry about it. In 1947,
>> City of Chicago municipalized (a polite term for theft when City of
>> Chicago does it out of politicians' greed) all seven or eight
>> transportation companies and merged them all into Chicago Transit 
>> Authority. 

> Did CTA ever operate chartered 'funeral cars'?  Again, true.  About
> two blocks south of Lill Coal Company is the Graceland Cemetery, a
> very big place (it occupies four or five square miles in the heart of
> Chicago's northwest side, and even rates a telephone exchange named
> after it [GRAceland 312/773-472].)  Many big wigs are buried there
> with huge monuments, etc. It also rates its own railroad siding, which
> was used in the 1920-40's to bring recently deceased big wigs for
> burial. All the bereaved family members and friends would ride along
> in the Chicago Rapid Transit street car made up like a funeral car to
> the cemetery. Family and friends came from Milwaukee all the way to
> south side Chicago for the funerals. Either North Shore or Chicago
> Rapid Transit would bring them there. This was Charles Insull's idea.
> And the chartered street cars would pull in almost daily for someone's
> funeral. When Chicago Rapid Transit went out of business (or actually,
> merged into CTA), Graceland asked the same sort of questions as Lill
> Coal would ask several years later when North Shore went poof! *Who is
> going to haul _our_ 'freight' to the ceremonies, etc. CTA agreed out
> of customer good will to continue handling the cemetery business for
> about a year in 1947-48, then stopped doing it. But the tracks are
> still there, all rusted and full of weeds right behind the cemetery
> where the one sidetrack slopes down to ground level and runs along
> for about a block. PAT]

The interesting part about our office is that there's a siding that
runs right through the parking lot, crosses West River Street then
heads off into USPS huge facilities in Providence.

Here's what interests me. We could use that rail to supply the nearby
supermarket and the USPS but nobody sees the economies in that.

------------------------------

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
Subject: Re: Train Passengers Asked to Get out and Push Stalled Train
Date: 19 May 2007 18:43:46 -0700
Organization: http://groups.google.com


T wrote:

> In places spread far, I can understand that. Here in RI the Transit 2020
> report says we MUST use light rail between the cities since the highways
> can no longer support the volume of traffic that would be necessary.

Land is finite.  In developed regions (suburbs, too) we're out of
land.  Highways use up an enormous amount of land.

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a trick question for you ...
> CTA at one point hauled freight as well as passengers; true or false?

> TRUE ... it happened like this:  When North Shore Railroad was operating
> toward the end of its life, the railroad had ONE freight customer,
> whose name was 'The Lill Coal Company'. Lill's office was on Broadway,
> about a block north of Montrose Avenue. (For you young'uns, people used
> to heat their houses with coal in coal burners. Gradually, we dropped
> coal and went (first) to oil (then later) to gas. And just as
> gradually, businesses like Lill, which supplied coal to individuals,
> schools, companies, whoever had to go out of business. But for the two
> year interim between North Shore RR going out business followed by
> Lill Coal Company going out of business, Lill was quite frantic. *How*
> would their coal supply be delivered to them for their customers?

It is common to find abandoned coal trestle railroad sidings.  The
train would park over concrete bins and pour the coal out from
trapdoors in the car's bottom.  A local distributor would then deliver
it to customers.  Many of those dealers switched to oil and are still
in business.

The Philadelphia School District, allegedly under political pressure
from PA coal towns, built new schools using coal for heat into the
1950s. I think coal is cheaper per BTU than oil, that is, you can
save money heating with coal.  But coal is dirty and hard to work
with, that's why oil took over.

> Did CTA ever operate chartered 'funeral cars'?  Again, true.

Many interurban lines handled local freight cars.

In the early years, many streetcar lines handled freight in special
"box motors" which were trolley cars only without seats or windows.
Carrying milk from the country into the city and US Mail were common
uses in the early 1900s.  When the motor truck was perfected in the
1920s this business was lost.

I understand the New York City MTA still carries freight.  There's a
tiny little freight line in Brooklyn the MTA owns that is a common
carrier.  Most of its work is hauling deliveries to the MTA itself
(e.g new subway cars, rail, etc.)  But if there are any industries
left along its tracks, it will deliver freight to them.

Philadelphia used to have a funeral streetcar available for charter
back in the days when trolley tracks covered the entire city and
nearby suburbs.  The trolley would pick up mourners at the church and
take them to the cemetary.  It had a special compartment for the
casket.

As to light freight service, at one time the mainline railroads
carried lots of single car loads for individual customers.  Any
factory of reasonable size had a siding, and there were also public
sidings.  Handling these cars meant a local freight had to prod along
and pick up and deliver cars.  The cars had to be switched into and
out of through trains going to different places until the car ended up
at its destination.  By government regulation, the service was cheap
and mandated, though rather slow.  The railroads wanted out of this
business, preferring to concentrate on high volume single customer
shipments, like a trainload of coal for a power plant instead of one
coal car for one customer.  (Large institutions, like a college, had a
RR siding for coal deliveries, they'd get a couple of car loads in the
fall for winter heating.)  As Pat noted, even if only one customer was
left the RR had to keep the entire line open and working ($$$) to
serve that single customer.

After deregulation of the railroad industry, the big railroads were
relieved of this burden and could charge rates that reflected actual
costs.  Little short-line railroads took over in a few places, in
others, tiny side lines were abandoned.  It is unfortunate it took so
long for deregulation, this should've happened in the 1950s instead of
1980s.  (Yes, there are still industries with limited car deliveries,
but they pay for it now.)

Today, freight engines and crews have modern railroads.  I don't know
if locomotives have fax or computer printers to give out dispatchers'
orders or if that is still relayed orally.  The locmotives are far
more fuel efficient due to microprocessor controls.


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Speaking of freight and coal cars, one
of the most unusual operations I ever saw -- in my childhood at least
 -- was the 'Commonwealth Edison Railroad'; engines and coal cars
marked as property of Commonwealth Edison in the Chicago area. On the 
far southeast side of Chicago (where it touches Whiting, IN) used to
be a _huge_ electrical generating station operated by Edison. Immediatly
next to it (between it and Lake Michigan, upon which it sat, were a 
group of railroad tracks running to/from Chicago and the steel mills
and oil refineries of Northern Indiana. 

A highly dangerous place for little boys to hide, or play around,
which of course is what made it so appealing to us. Eight or ten
tracks going through there, with eighty to one hundred car freight
trains all traveling at sixty to seventy miles per hour, zipping
toward Chicago or outbound to somewhere else. What I specifically
recall were the 'Edison trains'; locomotives marked 'Commonwealth
Edison' straining to pull several dozen coal cars loaded to the brim
with coal to be dumped in the coal pit there. The engine would pull
all its cars a bit past that point, then back up on a siding which
sort of went up an incline. These trains came from the coal mines
in West Virginia. As the train at that point slowly pushed a car
up the incline to the top, the back coal car would slip into place
in a device at the top where a man would (using machinery) clamp
the sides of the coal car and the entire thing (including the track
it was sitting on) would be turned upside down, the entire car full
of coal dumped into the pit below it where it landed on a conveyor
belt which kept pushing the coal out of the way. Now, the empty coal
car was uprighted once again, and disconnected from the rest of the
train; then the engine would move slightly, and give that final (and
now empty) car a bump backward, so the car would roll down the incline
and back to level ground, where somehow or another it managed to get
hooked into several more recently empty coal cars. 

When this had gone on all day, another engine went to the front of the
cars and was hooked up to the empties, which were then all hauled away
back to West Virginia for more coal. That went on all day and night,
most every day. It seemed to us kids like a bottomless pit where the
coal was dumped; it never reached the top nor anywhere close, but we
saw men working down in the bottom of the pit as well as men working
on the top of the bridge-like structure where coal cars were bumped
into place just prior to being dumped. And all day long, never
ceasing, these plumes of black smoke coming out of the chimney stacks
on top of the gothic cathedral like building attached. The building
was called 'State Line Electric Generating, Inc; a Division of
Commonwealth Edison' and it was a most fascinating place to
visit. There were also three or four very large metal rods stuck in
the ground here and there by the building. I was told these were
'lighting rods' for the times which, when  during a bad thunderstorm  
lightning would (apparently attracted by the turbines, etc inside)
strike around the building. 

Throughout the day at various times other trains would go zooming past
on the other tracks outside. The very extreme corner of northwest
Indiana, at the Illinois/Lake Michigan/Whiting border. PAT]

------------------------------

From: Fred Atkinson <fatkinson@mishmash.com>
Subject: Re: Telephone Dialing in Old Movies
Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 10:24:26 -0400
Organization: NewsGuy - Unlimited Usenet $19.95


> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But, please remember that in smaller
> towns with only one phone exchange (example 620-331) oftn times we
> only orally give the last four digits when speaking with someone,
> although we are required to dial all seven to make a call.  PAT]

When I lived in Gadsden, Alabama in the late sixties, they had a five
digit plan.  The two exchanges there are 546 and 547.  You could dial
68820 (which was our telephone number at home).  Or 72550 (one I made
up just now) and actually reach 546-8820 and 547-2550.

I sincerely doubt that that plan is still in place (I just don't know
either way).

There was also a 543 exchange that was a local call to our area.  But
it did not work to dial three and the last four digits.  I don't
particularly know why.

Regards, 

Fred 

------------------------------

From: harold@hallikainen.com <harold@hallikainen.com>
Subject: Re: Telephone Dialing in Old Movies, Police Radio
Date: 19 May 2007 16:00:17 -0700
Organization: http://groups.google.com


On May 18, 5:53 pm, Wesr...@aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated Fri, 18 May 2007 09:43:57 PDT, Paul Coxwell

> <paul_coxw...@yahoo.com> writes:

>> I have a Star communications receiver, built in the 1960s for the
>> North American market and it has the band from approx. 1.6 to 1.7MHz
>> marked as "Police," so presumably it was still in fairly widespread
>> use at that time.

> The Oklahoma Highway Patrol used to use 1626 kHz.  I don't know when
> they shifted away from that.

> Wes Leatherock

1722 and 1730kHz are still available for use by police departments
(see http://www.hallikainen.com/FccRules/2007/90/20/) . A search of
the FCC Universal Licensing System does not turn up any licensees
using either of these frequencies. There are a lot of licensees in the
1700 to 1800 kHz region. Some of these are from the "public safety
pool," but are Travelers Information Service stations instead of
police dispatching.

Back in the late 1950s, I had an "American Five" vacuum tube radio that
had the police band marked above the AM broadcast band. In the San
Francisco East Bay area, I could hear Los Angeles police dispatch.

Harold

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 19 May 2007 22:22:54 -0500
From: Neal McLain <nmclain@annsgarden.com>
Subject: Re: Telephone Dialing in Old Movies


hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

> I watched a number of movies on TCM lately and noticed various
> telephone dialing patterns.... In some scenes seven digits were
> dialed, but in others only five ...

I wrote:

> Or only four. I don't remember the name of the movie, but phone
> number 6258 is important. The wife tries to call her husband at his
> workplace (a school) by dialing the school PBX; he's not there, but
> the school operator says he's at 6258. Wife then dials 6258, and a
> strange female voice answers. Wife hangs up without saying anything.
> Plot thickens.

PAT wrote:

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But, please remember that in smaller
> towns with only one phone exchange (example 620-331) oftn times we
> only orally give the last four digits when speaking with someone,
> although we are required to dial all seven to make a call.  PAT]

True -- same thing happens with 979-798 here in Texas.  But that
wasn't what happened in the unnamed movie: in that case, the wife
clearly (and nervously) dialed four digits on a rotary dial phone.

I wish I could remember the name of that movie.  Anybody recognize it?

Neal McLain

------------------------------


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End of TELECOM Digest V26 #140
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