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Archive for the ‘Weird Telecom’ Category.
For those of you who are fans of creepy science fiction you will know only too well the sound of the theremon. That strange electric instrument that is the mainstay of sound effects in most low budget scifi. Now you can get it in your mobile phone.
Continue reading ‘Theremon Revisited’ »
We don’t think we can improve on this story. Its another case of truth is stranger…
Continue reading ‘You’ll Get Yours Later’ »
While Thanksgiving in OHANL has come and gone, our southern neighbors are just getting the trimmings out of storage for another feast of the gobbler. It seems appropriate to trot out the latest of the great turkeys…
Continue reading ‘Turkey Time’ »
In what might be the weirdest pairing in the mobile industry Tag Heuer and Lamborghini have joined forces and created, wait for it, a mobile phone. Not any mobile phone, but the Meridiist.
Continue reading ‘Fast And On Time’ »
We suppose that folks with a little too much time on their hands eventually would get to this—as an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce all of Shakespeare.
Continue reading ‘Sonata For Touchtone’ »
So a few days ago by mistake I mis-dialed a toll free number. I reached 1-800-987-0768. Nothing there but some guy reading out what at first appears to be random numbers and then it redials a number. I call back again and same thing but new numbers…
Speed dial another time and this time I record the call to get all of the digits. Telephone service is predictable so this mystery should be solved shortly. I record the call three times and here’s what it gets to;
Random pattern of digits to the first five characters but could that be an NPA then NXX and number? I check out the NPA lookup for 711 and direct hit! The NPA is an area code reserved for Telecommunications Relay Services;
Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) is a telephone service that allows persons with hearing or speech disabilities to place and receive telephone calls.
Now the numbers being dialed always ring busy so I cannot tell if they are intended to go to that actual 711 number location or if it’s dialing something else. Hmmm need my trusty DTMF decoder. While it’s possible that my DTMF decoder is on the fritz (not used for many years, though it tested good on my phone) it recorded what were, at best, random dialed numbers. So mystery remains…I hate being foiled on a case!
On the eve of the FCC announcement of the proposed rules for net neutrality Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon Communications CEO, decided it was appropriate to float out a few gallons of FUD at the Supercomm 2009 in Chicago.
Continue reading ‘Bluster, Bluff and Braggadocio’ »
A friend of ours, who is a regularly reader of our Weird Telecom posts, sent us this along for your viewing pleasure. We know it’s hard to think that folks would move cable reels into buildings this way but believe us it happens more than you can imagine—hopefully with a bit more planning than these guys.
Continue reading ‘Rollin’’ »
You might recall from prior scribblings here we fiddled about with a new TLD that holds out hope to create a global address book.
Signing up for a .tel domain is rather a no-brainer. A number of providers will happily sell you a unique domain that can be used to display your information. Filling in the data is also straight forward, .tel is both a registry and a micro-domain. All data resides in a single site and your data entry is largely fill in the blank. You can see our .tel domain at Shulist Group .tel site. A cool feature is that the site will allow you to extract a vcard for your address book. You can also control who gets your data.
While all possible steps we’re taken to allow legitimate domain owners to get access to their names (corporations had months to register before the floodgates were opened) it seems that a good number of domain names were scooped up on spec. The problem will be to get a short name so that it is easy to distribute.
So if you want your own .tel domain you should sign up soon. It’s one more way to connect with the world.
I had great memories of the wonderful things that Nortel developed over the years. It’s too bad it’s come down to this;
