TELECOM Digest Tue, 22 Jul 2003 16:35:00 EDT Volume 22 : Issue 575 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson and: Lisa Minter Bulletin! Fire at Telecommunications Room at Eiffel Tower (Robt Weller) PRI vs. Plain Vanilla T-1 (Don Matteson) Time Warner Customer Service (Fred Atkinson) Re: Speaking of Speaking Clocks (John R. Covert) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. WE DO NOT PERMIT NAME/EMAIL ADDRESS HARVESTING FROM THIS JOURNAL. 'SALTED' EMAIL ADDRESSES APPEAR HEREIN TO VERIFY THIS. YOU GET SUED IN SMALL CLAIMS COURT IF YOU GET CAUGHT SPAMMING OR SENDING VIRUSES. DON'T DO IT. See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 13:03:54 -0700 Subject: Bulletin! Fire at Telecommunications Room at Eiffel Tower From: Robert Weller [Lisa Minter note: This bulletin arrived as the last issue of the Digest was starting circulation. We are sending it out as a special report. Lisa M.] http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=3&u=/ap/20030722/ ap_on_re_eu/france_eiffel_tower_15 (AP) PARIS - A small fire near the top of the Eiffel Tower was extinguished shortly after erupting Tuesday evening, Paris police said. The fire caused panic among tourists but no injuries. The fire was out at around 8 p.m. local time, just 40 minutes after it was reported, said fire official Christian Decolloredo. It appeared to originate among a knot of cables in a telecommunications room. Decolloredo said the fire occurred on a floor accessible to tourists. Earlier, the company that operates the Eiffel Tower said the fire broke out on an upper level where technical installations are located and not accessible to the public. Thick gray smoke began to taper off shortly after the fire was reported. Fire trucks and rescue vehicles rushed to the base of the tower. A stream of about 150 visitors filed out after being evacuated, firefighters said. Jean-Paul Proust, the Paris police chief, said the evacuation took place "in absolute calm." "The fire is out, it was a fire in a telecommunications room," he said. "I can't give you the cause." Decolloredo said an investigation was under way. The tower was temporarily closed, but he could not say for how long. A red helicopter swooped around the tower, inspecting the lower floors. Police blocked off access as tourists waited on the grass below, taking photographs or peering up through binoculars. Some of those who fled the tower were visibly shaken. "I was at the top level with a friend of mine, and we started smelling some kind of bad smell," said tourist Ivan Dosso, an Ivory Coast native who now lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Eiffel Tower staff quickly directed him and others to the stairs leading to the exit, and he rushed down. "I'm so distraught," Dosso said. "I'm glad they were able to stop it." The 324-meter (1,069-feet) iron-laced tower draws 6 million visitors a year, making it the world's most popular paying tourist attraction. The tower was built by Gustave Eiffel for the 1889 World's Fair. The tower houses reception rooms and two restaurants, including the celebrated Jules Verne on the second floor. Last month, after nearly a year of rewiring, tower operators began switching on 20,000 decorative light bulbs on the structure every night. [Lisa Minter note: If more news is recieved on this, I will report it promptly here. Lisa M.] ------------------------------ From: matteson@rocketmail.com (Don Matteson) Subject: PRI vs. Plain Vanilla T-1 Date: 22 Jul 2003 12:17:56 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Hi all - I'm a computer guy thrust into the role of having to make sense of a proposal from a potential telecom vendor. In a nutshell, here's the situation: We currently have a PRI system in place over a copper T-1 line and we have a 256K SDSL line for Internet access. As I understand it, the PRI allows us 23 B channels (plus one D channel) to use for our voice communications. Another company proposes taking us over to a T-1 with 12 business lines plus 4 channels dedicated to our Internet access. It seems to me that we'll be losing several lines in the transition, which could hurt us when we hit our busy season in a few months. My little brain tells me that in either case, there are a total of 23B+1D channels available (since they're both T-1 based), but the PRI allows us to handle a larger call volume because all 23 B channels are going to voice traffic. On the other hand, the straight T-1 approach would limit us to 12 channels, with enough room to expand to 19 B channels (the last 4 being reserved for our Internet connection). We were getting our butts kicked back when we only had 8 lines (in our pre-PRI days), so I'm leery of reducing the number of available voice lines. Am I thinking about this at all lucidly? My grasp on T-1 vs. PRI is clearly pretty weak, so I'd appreciate any feedback. Of course, if this is a RTFM situation, I'd appreciate it if you could direct me to some FMs to R. :) Thanks in advance, Don ------------------------------ Reply-To: Fred Atkinson From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Time Warner Customer Service Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 15:18:23 -0400 On July 1, I got a Road Runner cablemodem installed. Since July 1, I've experienced four area wide outages. I've asked Road Runner and Time Warner to provide an explanation for the frequent outages and I wanted to know what steps are being taken to reduce the likelihood of further outages. I've only gotten pass the buck (I'm not the one to answer that, that's not my area) replies. Sometimes they blindly transfer me to someone's voicemail. Other times, they say they will have someone investigate and get back to me. It never happens. I ask to speak to a supervisor, am told one will call me within four hours time, and it doesn't happen. When I call in and raise enough sand to finally get to speak to a supervisor, they listen and tell me that they will relay my comments to higher management but there's nothing they can personally do. I told her that I wanted to know what they were doing to stop these outages. She said they would investigate and someone would call me back. Yesterday, just before I left the house, they called back and said that they were coming over to replace my NIC card. My NIC card is functioning fine and there was absolutely no reason that they should have wanted to replace it. I am scratching my head as to how they concluded that my NIC card was the cause of four area outages. I, of course, told them not to change that card. They canceled the dispatch. When I discussed addressing these problems with one of their customer service reps, I was just told there was nothing he could do. When I told him I was a twenty-five year veteran of the telecom/I.T. industry and was trained never to tell a customer that and to provide him with information about his outage and a reasonable estimate of time of restoral, he becamse very boisterous with an unporofessional 'good for you' remark. With all of the really good, experienced people out of work that would be glad to work for less than what they previously made (just to be able to work), I am quite shocked at the caliber of customer service and support people I have encountered there. I'd love to work for them and I could do a much better job than that. But, my impression is that they only want to hire entry level people to keep their costs down. Of course, their customers suffer for that tactic. I've submitted my resume to Time Waner a number of times, but I never get a phone call. I don't remember even getting a 'we'll hold your resume on file for six months' post card from them. If I were not in a 'half price for a three month tiral' mode, I would have already canned them. I found that DSL is available in my area and I am seriously considering switching over when my three month special is up. Fred ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2003 15:22:23 EDT From: John R. Covert Subject: Re: Speaking of Speaking Clocks I had written: > For what it's worth, 202 TIme 4-xxxx (DC) is off by 25 seconds at the > moment. 410 TIme 4-xxxx (Balto) is right on. And joeofseattle replied: > Any special reason you X'd out the numbers for DC and Balto? To let you guess it, and get it right on the first try. (You will, no matter what you guess, just like the one for Boston.) > Re the difference between GPS time and UTC (Jay Ashworth) Er, no. The time displayed by a GPS receiver, which will correct the base time by adding the leap second correction contained within the message transmitted by the satellites, will be right in synch with UTC. Otherwise lots of things would be broken. /john ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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