From the RAT Files circa 2003: I Remember Mama!

The following was originally composed as radio copy for THIS WEEK IN AMATEUR RADIO which first aired in July of 2003. Please click on http://www.twiar.org/ for additional information on this amateur radio news service.

I remember Mama. But we didn't really call her Mama. And we didn't necessarily hold her in the highest regard. And we didn't really call her Mama. We called her Ma Bell. We also called her "monopoly". Because that's what she was. Just like the Parker Brothers board game. People called her Ma Bell. A seemingly simple and kindly nickname affixed to a corporate fortress for most of the 20th century, most notably in the 1950's and 60's by television comedians and clever boy magazine editors as an alias for this same corporate fortress better known as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the Bell System or simply, AT&T. Ma Bell always knew what was best for us and our telephones. We all had the same basic Western Electric telephone instrument, a miniature corporate fortress encased in black Bakelite, sheathed in a steel foundation with bomb-proof transducers for the hearing and the speaking, the two big steel half-moon bells for the banging and the clanging. Plus the implant: the 425B (actually A through at least K) network box, a small metal containment of electrical resistors, varistors, capacitors, a clod of wires and other junk terminally sealed in some kind of really gooey and greasy cancer-causing lubricant, obviously not meant to be tampered with. Unknown to the common telephone citizen, such network boxes handled the ugly chores of impedance matching, controlling audio side tone, voltage spike suppression and DC current blocking for the bell ringer coil. And : You leased the Western Electric telephone instrument. You did not own it.

Western Electric was the hardware subsidiary of the monopoly but Ma bell did respond occasionally to customer demand. The appearance of the pastel- colored, sensually shaped, ovalesque Princess Phone for the young teenage gal, the functional, relatively unobtrusive and somehow always yellow, pink or beige kitchen wall phone for the stay-at-home housewife and the equally functional but very 60's suburban-class TrimLine. I do recall the promise of the future and the demonstration of the Bell System PicturePhone at the 1964 New York World's Fair but this promise was never kept during her regime. The promise was not kept but the Princess Phone's little rotary dial would always light up brightly whenever the handset was lifted.

The media, through these same television comedians and clever boy magazine editors, was never really comfortable with the monopoly. Ma Bell was the Microsoft of the early to mid-20th century. Your daily experience with your Western Electric telephone instrument was a dependable albeit banal affair beyond these few trivial offerings. You knew you could lift the hand set and dial the zero but not the "OH"..and actually DIAL the zero but not the "OH" using the rotary contraption on your Western Electric telephone instrument and receive the pleasant and not always nasal voice of your hometown operator.

You never heard a man's voice! It just wasn't done! And the things that she could do! Set up a station-to-station call. And arrange a collect call. And we knew that she knew when the collect call was completed and we asked the party at the other end if "Frank" was there and they said: "No, not here!" that this was a secret code telling everyone at home that you were AOK. She knew. But she didn't mind at all. That same disembodied voice could patch you into other nifty operators. The salty marine operator. The foreign-accented overseas operator. The very high flying aviation operator.The very high frequency mobile telephone operator.

Even the hometown directory assistance ladies, armed with their big rubber thumbs, thumbing and fingering for the numbers in the big DA phone books. And chances were, if you lived in a small enough locality, you may have even been on a first name basis with your hometown operator. And your phone book was your Bible. Every business listed in two colors, The white pages. And the yellow. Your family. And friends. Dutifully listed as well. Except for the elitists who by their own request were non-published and maybe even unlisted. All was well in the world of telephones.

Some have speculated that perhaps the very first hairline fracture in the Bell System fortress may have been the arrival of the Western Electric touch tone telephone instrument. The future was here! And those who were status minded and trendy if not necessarily forward-thinking would actually *pay* for that privilege. But this got people thinking.

Then there was the big crack: The 1968 Carterphone Decision, which cut cloth on a whole new industry of interconnect devices,allowing manufacturers other than Western Electric to sell telephone devices such as private mobile radio interfacing systems to businesses nationwide. For us commoners, this meant that we could attach things to our telephones, like our *own* non-Western electric telephone instrument!

And then, AT&T divestiture in 1984! Oh my! Who knew? Who knew that Ma Bell, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the Western Electric and the Bell System would actually be forced by the United States Department of Justice to subject herself to corporate binary fission and subdivide into seven RBOCs or Regional Bell Operating Companies, further splitting off into 164 Local Access And Transport Areas or LATAs (I live in in LATA 132), a messy mob of Competitive Local Exchange Carriers or CLECs and also InterExchange Carriers or IECs to handle the local telephone traffic? Ma Bell, her heirs and future competitors would always be big on abbreviations. A Baby Bell for every region. An RBOC for every town. The big monopoly was dead. But many small monopolies were born. And for a while... All was well in the world of telephones.

AT&T long Lines would still be there for the long distance and the RBOCs would still be there for the local distance. Customers would eventually come to enjoy a veritable explosion of all kinds of telephone services and communications possibilities hereto for undreamed of. Mickey Mouse telephones! And telephones that looked like a shoe! Answering machines! 49 Megahertz cordless phones! Fax machines! And then, President Bill Clinton's unleashing of the Super Information Highway, along with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped bring those big ugly beige boxes and their big ugly beige screens, with their stringy mouses and and their wiry and clunky crap-out keyboards into our homes...And while no one was looking, another guy named Bill was busy building another telecommunications monopoly.

Elsewhere...Competition was rife! Fabulous deals for the new-fangled cellular phone!...though some people called them Cell-O-Phones. Big contract deals! Big no-contract deals! Prepaid Phones! Prepaid calling cards! 900 MegaHertz cordless phones! Call Waiting! Call forwarding! Three-way calling! Caller ID! Call Blocking! All this crap! Customers were becoming phone crazy!

Even standard residential and business services burgeoning with new, seemingly impossible money-saving plans. Text messages and Webpages over wireless PDAs! 802-11b War Driving WIFI weirdoes with beardoes, trenching the streets looking for the free zone Internet-access hot spots! 2.4 GigaHertz spread spectrum cordless phones! All this crap! All this cheap, third-world, disposable crap! But soon... As there is always a yang to a yin... As there is always dark cloud to a silver lining... As there is always an Omega to an Alpha... Little anguishes began to seep in as the diversity of divestiture began to unfurl in ways perhaps not foreseen by its champions.

Consider the following: Here in upstate New York while there are many competing telephone concerns, the primary carrier is Verizon. Verizon used to be Bell Atlantic which used to be NYNEX and prior to that, New York Telephone. The names have changed so fast and so furiously, that many Verizon customers still regard it as New York Telephone, perhaps a subconscious subliminal yearning for the Parker Brothers system of years gone by. If you are a Verizon customer, you can dial 411 for your friendly directory assistance operator and request a telephone listing in your home town but Verizon's service is called National 411 so you can request a number in Ronkonkoma, New York, Kokomo, Indiana or Kook-a-munga, California, all for an additional nominal fee. But, if you are not a Verizon customer and you call Verizon's directory assistance, you may only receive listings within your own area code. Any requests beyond your area code may be blocked. Why? Because National 411 is a special service provided only to Verizon customers. You may have your own national directory available to you, but unless you read the fine print in your telephone service plan, you may never know. You begin to empathize with the confusion, the twinge of abdominal muscles and the dull gray throb to the skull.

But it gets better or worse. Verizon changed things so that when you dial zero for the operator, you get something called "EASY-OH". Zero delivers to your ear an automated menu. The choices: emergency police or fire services, business or residential service, business or residential repair and directory assistance. No mention of an option to press a digit for the zero operator. This is intentional because Verizon analyzed call volumes and determined that these choices are what people most often want when they dial zero. You, the caller can get the zero operator, but you may have to wait on the line or you must use a secret code. Very few callers know that as the menu is playing, doing the zero key again will dump the menu and immediately connect you to a zero operator. Meanwhile, some folks are pressing the "OH" over and over again. But this is the number 6 on the keypad and produces no result.

Confusion, mayhem and pain also comes during your daily business activities. Many banks, such as Fleet Bank, HSBC and Citibank provide a unified local telephone number for all their branches. So the number for Chasebank on Route 112 in Patchogue is the same as the one on Bailey Avenue in Buffalo, New York some 500 miles distant. The US Postal Service is quietly in the process of replacing all local telephone numbers in every city, town and village in the United States with a single toll-free number. An interesting thing about this toll-free number is that there is no option to connect to your local Post Office. It would appear that the Post Office would prefer not to talk to you. Patrons have freaked out and are furious.

Back in the Big Apple, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that all numbers dialed in the five boroughs must be eleven digits instead of seven. So, if you work on the 79th floor of the Empire State Building and you want to call someone on the 28th floor, you must dial 1 plus the three- digit area code plus the seven-digit number. That's: 1+NPA+NUMBER. NPA=AREACODE. But secretly, NPA=Number Plan Area. It's the same thing. But it's just too easy to officially refer to the area code as the "area code". Are you following all this so far?

You don't have to live in NYC to suffer eleven digit dialing. Many cities, towns and villages across the fruited plain are experiencing area code splits and something called area code overlay. If you grew up in Sullivan County in the Jewish Alps (the Catskill Mountains) of upstate New York, you knew your NPA was 914. Not any more. Under FCC mandate, you lost your coveted 914 and became an 845. Only Westchester County got to keep the esteemed 914. All the other counties in 914 were banished to the common man's 845. Back in town, more chaos. A generation ago, all of New York City was under one area code - 212.

Then, the split decision: Manhattan - 212. The rest of New York - 718. But things change. Living in Manhattan, you may now get a 646 or a 917 number and being in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island may fetch you a 347. These additional numbers are termed area code overlays because they share the same geographic region as the original Number Plan Area. And while teeth-gritting urbanites were still coming to grips with dialing eleven digits, Gotham City government agencies decided to amalgamate all city services under a new simple three-digit telephone number. Simply dial: 311. But New Yorkers still don't quite know how to respond to this. Do you dial 1-212-311 or do you put the 212 after the 311. At 311, you can hopefully find the Mayor's Office, the Finance Department, the Health Department, the Sanitation Department, the Department of Homeless Services, Mental Health, Consumer Affairs and many other expensive government agencies. Not having heard this yet, I must assume the menu plays on with more numbers to press than there are numbers to press.

Now, consider this: Your local telephone company most likely publishes telephone directories butthere may be more than one phone book from more than one publisher tossed on your doorstep. I heard a phone book story from our esteemed technical director George Bowen - W2XBS: Here in Albany, Verizon distributes their phone book in the Spring. Customers dutifully dump their out-of-date books and place the new book within arm's reach of their most-likely non-Western Electric telephone instrument. Three weeks later, another publisher,TransWestern, moves their book through the same community, Customers assume this is yet another update and dutifully dump the new Verizon book, not realizing that they swapped one Bible for another that may not carry the same listings or may actually contain listings that Verizon does not have. And the confusion. And the chaos. And the mayhem. Continues. And this is where the chapter ends because I have a headache.

But maybe more on this topic in some future rant. This is Bill Baran - N2FNH - for the Random Access File. A thing heard exclusively over This Week In Amateur Radio. For reasons not entirely clear. -30-

P.S.: Shortwave radio listeners worldwide will recall the voice of Jane Barbe who passed away on 18 July, 2003. Ms. Barbe has been the voice of WWVH, the time and frequency radio station of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) based in Hawaii since the early 1970's. WWVH can be heard on 2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20MHz. Anyone who has used a telephone anywhere in the United States over the last four or five decades is also intimately familiar with her voice She is known for such classic telephone network messages as: "I'm sorry. The number you have dialed is not in service or is temporarily disconnected. Please check the number and dial again or ask your operator for assistance. This is a recording". A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Ms. Barbe passed away after a battle with cancer. She was 74.