UCAN

Ask me my name. Go ahead.

"What's your name?"

Self-aware biological organism with 23 chromosomes.

True, but it doesn't help much. Generic info. If you accused this entity of a crime. you'd involve a lot of individuals.

As a consumer you need to know something about what you're getting and who provides it. When this thing you've got is a physical object you can probably find out who made it by reading the label or the case or the instructions (not men, of course). But what if it's a concept - a service or something else incorporeal? An ethereal resource like your long distance carrier? How do you know what carrier you're actually using if the info is wrong?

As UCAN Blog readers know, there's a ripoff that's been around for some years called Slamming. This occurs when your long distance carrier is changed without your consent. Here are some links to more info on slamming:

http://www.ucan.org/telecommunications/landline/switching_local_toll_and_long_distance_carriers 

http://public.findlaw.com/consumer/long-distance-carrier.html

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/slamming.html

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:xsz0bfxyAlsJ:www.consumerlaw.org/in...

You should, from time to time, both look at your phone bill which will state who your long distance carrier is, and dial 1-700-555-4141 which will result in a recording saying the name of the carrier. You can also check to see where your Long Distance Operator calls go; that is, if you dial 00 (vs 0 which is your local "ILEC" carrier's Operator number) you will get your Long Distance carrier's Operator who can do things like make person-to-person and collect calls - they will identify themselves, and this info can be useful, too.

So we've got this nice tool to use but what if it returns useless information? I have Powernet Global as my carrier for my business line and my personal line (much to the dismay of Fraud Squad staffer Sue). Because Powernet is a wholesale reseller of another company's voice services (they being Williams Communications), I don't get told that my carrier is Powernet Global.  Here's what I exchanged with Powernet about this - and it's a case study in an organization not being helpful:

Question      When I dial 700-555-4141 from my 858-555-1212 phone number it just sits there, quiet. When I dial "00" it doesn't say "Welcome to PowerNet Global" or even "Welcome to Williams LLC, your long distance company's master carrier" [it says "WCLLC" - real helpful]

When I dial 700-555-4141 from my 858-555-3434 phone it says "Your long distance service is now active. 5 1 0 2" How is that useful? And "00" says the same thing as for my other number.

The whole point of 700-555-4141 is to let consumers ensure they have not been slammed. Whether this is Williams' problem or yours TECHNICALLY, as far as I'm concerned it's your problem because you're my carrier, not Williams

Answer    Thank you for contacting PowerNet Global regarding the underlying carrier.

We apologize for any inconvenience.   [ I hate it when businesses say that. It's so insultingly generic. Does anyone really think that they are really apologetic?] When you dial 1-700-555-4141 from your phone, it should say “You have been activated with 5102”. This is the correct message for Williams Communications.

Thank you for choosing PowerNet Global. We appreciate your business.

Question  My point is that you should tell WCLLC to make the recording say something useful so that the consumer actually gets some information. How many people do you really think understand "5 1 0 2"?

Also, today when I dialed 700-555-4141 from 858-555-1212 I got "All circuits are busy now". When I did the same from 858-555-3434 I got the 5102 message. Why wouldn't both say the same thing?

Answer    Thank you for contacting PowerNet Global regarding your account.

The 1-700-555-4141 telephone number is governed by local telephone companies. It is something they either offer or they don’t. The long distance companies have no control over the number itself.

As for the recording, we are sorry that the message is confusing to you. However, that is the recording you should receive.

So, it doesn't seem like PowerNet or Williams are interested in having the average consumer know if their long distance carrier has been changed. They just want to do the minimum to satisfy some kind of government mandate. 

 If you're not sure who your carrier is, and if you can't tell from the 700- recording or from your bill, please post what you've got HERE and we'll see if we can track them down for you.

Dr. T

This started with an email talking about how to properly forward emails. I have edited it and added some points. I hope readers, especially those fairly new to email, will find it useful.

While no longer high-tech to most Internet users, emails are an essential aspect of electronic communication. An email is cheap and fast. Unlike a phone call, the sender can compose it at a time of her choosing; the recipient is not interrupted since email (like mail and web pages) are passive in terms of the participants' involvement. An email can be sent to many recipients at once. An email can contain attachments (like a Christmas card might also have pictures of the family), can have pictures embedded in the body like a web page, and can have links to other web content. Unlike a phone call, though, mass email is forever.

Do you really know how to forward emails?  Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail?  Don't you just hate it? Every time you forward an email there is information left over from the people who received the message before you did, namely their email addresses and names. As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and all it takes is for one person to get a virus, and his computer can send that virus to every email address that has come across his computer. Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel! How do you stop it?  Well, there are several easy steps.  Try the following if you haven't done it before.

CLEANING UP AN EMAIL TO BE FORWARDED

Start by clicking FORWARD while the email is open:

1.  START WITH THE ORIGINAL: Ever get those emails that you have to open 10 pages to read the one page with the information on it?   By Forwarding the original text you wish someone to view, you stop them from having to open so many emails just to see what you sent.   You may have had to open numerous other pages before you got to the real forwarded message or you may found numerous versions of the same text repeated, ad infinitum, down the page. So EDIT! Either delete all but one instance of the “story” or, if the story is in an email attachment (that may be in an email attachment in an email attachment), open the deepest email attachment, then click FORWARD and send that to friends. Then delete the original email (you’ll still have the one you just forwarded as your own reference and it will be in your SENT folder.)

2. REMOVE OLD ADDRESSES FOR CLEANLINESS AND SECURITY: When you forward an email, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top of each previous mailing of the message, going on, ad infinitum, down the page). Since, in step 1 above, you deleted all the prior iterations of the same message, you only have to do this part once. Also, delete the advertisements at the bottoms of emails.

3. HIDE RECIPIENTS’ ADDRESSES: Whenever you send an email to more than one person, do not use the TO: or CC: fields for adding email addresses unless they are all people who know each other and you want them all to know who else got the email. Generally, though, it’s much better to use the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field for listing ALL the email addresses.  This way, the people you send to will not see other recipients’ email addresses.  If you don't see your BCC: go to your HELP menu and search for BCC – some programs like Outlook may hide this field and you’ll only see TO: and CC: but you can tell the program to show it.

4. CLEAN UP YOUR SUBJECT! Remove any ”FW:” in the subject line.  You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling. In essence: edit the SUBJECT line to be as if this is a brand new email. Nobody needs to know it was forwarded and it’s less confusing without all those FW’s.

5. IF THERE ARE ATTACHMENTS:

• See if they are duplicates. If so, delete all but one. You’ll reduce the download time for folks with slow internet and you won’t contribute to some people’s Inboxes go over their quotas.
• People often send around videos and other files that are 5MB or bigger and yet the same video can be found on YouTube, etc. If the attachments in your email are bigger than 100kB or so (bigger than a medium-sized picture) see if you can find it on the web: if the name of the attachment is (e.g.) aBigHonkinVideo.wmv go to Google et al and search for that name and chances are you will find it online.  Sending the URL takes up a couple of Bytes – sending the whole video takes millions of Bytes.
• Don’t forward files ending in .EXE or .COM  Even MS Word and MS Excel files could be infected so only forward if you are SURE it’s clean and if you’ve scanned it first.

PETITIONS:

These emails state a position then ask you to add your name and address and forward it.  The email can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses.

The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained therein.  Do not ever put your email address on any petition.

If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient.   Your position may carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry list of names and e-mail addresses on a petition. And don't believe the stories that say that the email is being tracked. However, keep in mind that most e-mail petitions that are forwarded with just a list of names are worthless because they do not fully identify the signer by street address, etc. An email does does not prove that the signer really signed it (it can be easily edited as we’re learning here).

Some of the other emails to delete and not forward are:

A. The ones that say something like, 'Send this email to 10 people and you'll see something great happen.'
B. And don't let the “bad luck” ones scare you either. Please do us all a favor and trash them.

C. Before you forward an  'Amber Alert', or a 'Virus Alert',  etc, check it out at

www.snopes.com
urbanlegends.about.com
www.truthorfiction.com

or look it up using a good search engine like Google or Yahoo before forwarding. Most of them are messages that have been circling the net for YEARS!

Point C above is important. Once an email intended to be passed around gets into “the wild” it’s out of control forever. It’s out of your control because people can edit it and change your intended message. It’s out of control because if the status of the subject changes over time, the email cannot be changed to reflect this or even be withdrawn. It’s like those Africanized bees that were accidentally released in South America back in 1955 and have moved north ever since. They are taking over European apian colonies and cannot be stopped. The best thing to do is to post your message on a web site, blog, etc. Anyplace public, on the Internet, that you have control of. Then just send the URL to that document to people. If your campaign to eradicate Glovner’s Disease becomes moot because it truly becomes eradicated, you can change the text of the web page thanking people for their contributions. An email asking for donations won’t continue around the internet for ever and ever. And, as mentioned, a URL takes up a couple of bytes while that long article may take up thousands multiplied by every person who gets it times all the people THEY send it to, etc. As an example, the original content for this article was posted on the web and all you really need to do is to forward

http://web.TheIdealist.net/consumer/emails.html

to your friends and not the actual text.

Finally, posting the original online means that it won’t lose its formatting as it gets forwarded each time, eventually becoming a shredded, unreadable, mess.

To send this original blog to friends, use this URL: http://www.ucan.org/blog/telecommunications/communications_technology/email_forwarding_and_etiquette

Think Australia and it conjures up the images of dry, desolate, deadly deserts. Given that the majority of the continent is desert, this is not an unjustified image. But it is a wrong one.

A vast majority of Australians live in moderate, albeit slightly arid regions. In the South and the West, think rolling hills verdant with wheat, livestock pastures, tree crops and vineyards. In the North, think tropic rainforests and vast floodplains that sometimes see more rain in one week than Seattle might see in an entire year. In the East -- where most Australians live -- it is a mix of Mediterranean moderacy and dry tropical rainforest. Australia boasts far more meteorological and geological diversity than most outsiders would imagine.

Nonetheless, the water reserves for the almost 35 million Australians are not up to the task of meeting burgeoning population growth. And climate change that is being felt most extremely at the poles is making its mercurial presence known in this pole-proximate continent. Keep in mind that Sydney is only about 1500 miles from the South Pole. Whereas New York City is more than 3200 miles from the North Pole. Australia's closeness to the South Pole makes it a canary in the global-warming mine. And its loss of predictable weather patterns combined with a mix of more extreme weather is putting Australians to the test well before North America in coping with nature's increasing volatility.

I've been to Australia eight times now and am just finishing up an 18-day visit to Western Australia. I am absolutely convinced that the country will be facing some significant ecological challenges that will test its science and its social fabric. I'm also absolutely convinced that there is no nation on earth that is more prepared for this test.

While George W. Bush distracted Americans from preparation for this challenge by enmeshing us in Middle Eastern tribal battles, the Australian governments have been laying the foundations for a more flexible and resourceful populace. Thinking green is a given -- the only differences lay with shades of green. The "dark greens" are viewed as extremists, in contrast to the most recent American government which viewed any "green sympathizer" as an extremist.

Having used the last decade to leap ahead of America, we now have some lessons to learn from this very resourceful and foresighted nation. For example, Australia's water policies are far more advanced than anything that can be found in America. Rationing is a given. Water-efficient devices can be found at almost every retail store. Most every rural location I visited in Western Australia had cisterns and other water-capture devices to supplement water needs. Most irrigation is done using recaptured water. And don't even get me started on the apparent fact that one out of every two homes I saw had solar hot water heaters installed on rooftops. Energy AND water efficient!

More than just the hardware, Australians have developed an ethic in which water smarts is respected and wastefulness viewed as socially rude. Notwithstanding their British roots, lawns are usually only found in public parks and those lawns I did see relied largely on recaptured water. The use of potable water to grow grass is viewed as just silly. Or, as every hotel room reminds its guests: "Water is a precious resource. Use it wisely". And the Aussies don't just preach this gospel, they live it.

The other notable aspect of Australian preparedness is that they trust their government policymakers to develop reasonable but strict rules for water usage. They may not like the rigors, but they respect it and take comfort in the fact that it is a burden that is shared by everyone. Not content to let the wealthier among them pay for wastefulness, the Australians view water waste as vile and not acceptable behavior no matter how wealthy the waster. Water smarts is a socially shared effort where everyone -- no matter what their rank or social status -- chips in and assists with the cause.

Preparedness. Trust in policymakers. Shared sacrifice. Water viewed as precious. Investment in water-efficient technology. Understanding the big picture. Australians have largely escaped "water wars" or using water to divide communities. These are all very important lessons that Americans, Californians and San Diegans would do well to heed.

Perhaps most impressive is that Australians are not content to rest on their laurels. Ever more aggressive water policies are being actively debated amongst most state governments. The debates are contentious and consensus on specific measures is always a challenge. But every elected official and almost every Australian with whom I spoke seemed to be on the same page about the big picture. Drought has become a constant spectre haunting this society. They all take this ghost VERY seriously.

Recently I was installing a new PBX (phone system) at UCAN. Being a phone geek, I always have my phone-guy test set (known to phone-guys as a "butt set" because it lets you "butt-in" on, or even monitor, a conversation) with me so I connected it to each of the terminals on the connection block in UCANs suite. Much to my surprise, there were more active lines (pairs of wire with dialtone) than anyone knew about. A call to Cox, the UCAN dialtone provider, determined that, yes, there were two pairs of lines that we hadn't accounted for and also some services or Features that UCAN didn't need.

This happens a lot. When a business first gets started they know how many lines they want and what features (services like CallerID, Call Forwarding, voicemail, etc) they want. But over time, as staff members and phone vendors come and go, things get forgotten. And while it's fairly easy to search for phone lines because they are actual things that can be seen, features are really just concepts - you can't touch or connect to a "Remote Call Forarding" charge. The bigger your business is the more likely it is for these things to be forgotten and add up and the typical phone bill doesn't make plain what you've got AND no phone verndor that I know of is going to be proactive and call you and say "Do you know you have a phone line that's not been used in 3 years? Still want it?".

Time For An Audit
Now, while your home or business is trying to cut back, is a good time to do a telecom audit. Start with your bill and try to determine how many lines you are being billed for. If you can't decipher the bill, call your carrier and ask them to go over it with you. You can also check your Customer Service Record, a sheet that vendors must send to customers once a year. Cox was very helpful and, once I explained what I was doing, they went beyond simply cancelling the lines I pointed out - they mentioned other things I might not want for my client (UCAN).

Also check for features you may not need. We discovered that the 7 POTS (Plain Ol' Telephone Lines) that UCAN has via Cox all had Call Transferring on them. This is a nice thing to have if each line is connected directly to a couple of phones. But Call Transferring, 3-way Calling, Conferencing, and Call Waiting are worthless if the lines with these features connect to a phone system.

Another thing we found was that the Fraud Squad line was being Call Forwarded. This means it's a full fledged phone line but calls coming to it were being sent to the main UCAN line and its dialtone, which was being paid for, was not being used. Again, when UCAN had no PBX, this was useful because it allowed the staff to, when necessary, send Fraud Squad calls to the main number. Once I discovered its existence and turned off the Forwarding, UCAN actually wound up with an 8th phone line on their PBX for no new fees - and they stopped paying the Forwarding feature monthly charge. I like being a hero!

You might have a Remote Call Forwarding account you've forgotten about. Similar to Call Forwarding, this is a very useful feature for some purposes. It lets you have a phone number but not pay the full cost of an actual line. Calls to this number are routed to another number that the caller is unaware of. Ask if you have any and then determine if they're actually being used or are dormant.

If you're technically inclined, feel free to snoop around your MPOE (where the lines come in to your building) if you are the only tenant. If you share the building, be careful while snooping because you could affect someone else's service. You could just limit your snooping to your own suite's "phone closet". Use a professional test set (butt-set) or make an adaptor for a plain old phone (a modular jack with a couple wires hanging out). CAUTION: while the standing "battery" on the line is 48v typically and the highest voltage that can be present is about 90v during current, and while these are current-limited voltages, they can still give you an unpleasant shock depending on conditions.

If you're not so technical, just call a phone-guy whose hour-or-so of snooping could easily pay for itself if things are found that you can cancel.

There are services out there who, for a percentage of your savings, will go thru your bills for you and not only find unused lines and features but potentially offer suggestions for lower local and long distance services. I don't know any to refer so check around and be sure that they aren't resellers for a particular carrier and might have a bias.

Many business telephone providers (PaeTec, TelePacific, Cox, Time Warner, AT&T, CBeyond, etc) will, if they think they might be able to get your business, do a free audit for you. Give them a couple of months' worth of bills and they will "show" you how they can save you money. Their main focus is rate plans but they can also look for numbers of lines and features to see if you still need them. Again, they have an obvious bias but they're not going lie about their findings.

The Bottom "Line"
When the Cox rep and I were done, we had cancelled

• 2 phone lines:    Maybe $30 each
• 7 Call Transfer features:  Maybe $2 each
• 1 Call Forwarding feature:  Maybe $2

for something like a $75 a month cost reduction AND they wound up with an 8th phone line.

Write to me here at http://www.ucan.org/internet_media/broadband_isps/ask_dr_telecom_the_com... if you see anything unusual on your bill. I can't go thru everyone's bill but I might be able to sort out some oddities that would help other readers.