NOTE:   These columns are written for telecommunications professionals only.

IN THE PHONE ROOM – The•Mart Magazine - June 2006

By Mike Sandman

• KILLED BY A BURN BOX
• SCRAP CABLE
• THE SMALLEST PHONE COMPANY IN THE COUNTRY
• WOULD YOU GET ON A PLANE BUILT BY SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS?

If you have tips that you’d like to share, give me a call at 630-980-7710, or e-mail me at mike@sandman.com. If your tip is published, it will be attributed to you, and you’ll get a FREE "Word Ad" in the classified section. To get your free "Word Ad," call The-Mart at 1-800-864-1199, and ask for Joy Brookshire. Opinions expressed in this column are strictly my own.

KILLED BY A BURN BOX

Gary Cessna from Advanced Communications Systems in Elkhart, Indiana called about a phone man who got killed while testing some pairs in the CO. He was using a "Burn Box," which is used to dry out a wet pair or clear some other problem from a pair. The box has batteries that will put about 750 volts at 40 amps down a pair – which literally vaporizes some problems. I didn’t think they were used any more.

Gary said the guy was using it at the frame at the CO, and a technician in the field had opened the pair going to the premise so they could burn it. Something went wrong, they heard a big bang in the CO, and they found the phone man laying on the floor. They gave him CPR, but he never made it to the hospital.

Being an Interconnect guy (I’ve never worked outside plant), my first encounter with one of these boxes was at a customer with an old ITT TD-100, in 1983. There weren’t many electronic phone systems in those days. Illinois Bell used a Burn Box from the CO or a pedestal in the neighborhood towards the customer’s premise. A couple of trunk cards were toasted. I would imagine they’re supposed to open the pairs to the premise before trying to fix a pair that way! In this case they didn’t, and it was really expensive. If your phone company uses one, you could end up with some toasted CO line cards, or you could end up toasted if you happen to get on that pair while they’re burning it.

SCRAP CABLE

World copper prices have risen 86% this year. I’d say you’ll be looking at a box of four pair costing about double what it was a year ago, very soon. The prices are up both because of increased demand all over the world, and lower output from copper mines. There’s an electronic, computer and telecom boom in places that had almost none of these items five or ten years ago.

When you propose a job, I’d consider making the proposal valid for X days, with a formula to increase (or decrease) the proposal based on your cost of cable. How you do it will depend on whether you’re charging a flat rate, or by the foot for each cable run.

While you may be able to find cable at the "old prices" here and there, you can’t depend on it, and the cost of shipping the cable from the guy with the old prices may be pretty high with today’s fuel surcharges on freight.

The Fedex and UPS air fuel surcharge for June is 16%, and the Fedex and UPS ground fuel surcharge is 4.25%.

It’s been a while since scrap cable was a big deal, but it’s now a very big deal. In checking with a scrap dealer in Chicago last month, he said he’d pay 50 cents a pound for four pair. They’d like to buy a minimum of a thousand pounds. 50 feet of CAT5e is about a pound, and 70 feet of 4 pair CAT3 is about a pound.

Everything old is new again. In the old days, each Bell technician and some Interconnect technicians had bags for scrap cable. They would keep filling the bags and turn them in when they were full. Some of the technicians turned them into a scrap dealer, instead of the company garage. You may want to let your technicians sell the scrap themselves as a "bonus," but more likely you’ll want to put those dollars into buying more cable.

Order heavy weight cardboard boxes from a local box company, or even yard waste bags from the grocery or hardware store, and mark them SCRAP WIRE in big letters on the box or bag. Every technician should turn in one or more bags after every install, or after several MACs. It’s not a bad idea to have the technician mark the name of the job(s) on each box of scrap cable so you can keep track of it.

If you need a stencil that you can use to spray paint SCRAP WIRE in 3" letters on the side of the box or bag, give us a call at 630-980-7710. We have a supply of SCRAP WIRE stencils for $14.95 each, and we can make a stencil with your company name for $25… to help make sure you get the scrap wire back.

We’re looking for unmarked heavy duty 2-ply bags to use as scrap wire, but they’re proving difficult to find. You can probably paint over the "yard waste" markings on the bags you buy from the grocery or hardware store (use regular spray paint), and then paint SCRAP WIRE in a contrasting color. Having a bag that says Yard Waste may get it thrown out by accident.

THE SMALLEST PHONE COMPANY IN THE COUNTRY

We have a Central Office Lookup on our web site that gives you the address and type of CO for every exchange in the country (www.sandman.com/colookup.asp), as well as any test numbers we have (like the 1KC tone or silent termination, but not ANI). Since there’s no way we can find out all the test numbers, if you know the numbers for a particular CO, you can enter it yourself (we check them to make sure it’s not someone’s grandmother’s number). Someone submitted a new test number last month, saying it was an "interesting intercept announcement." 218-488-0000. You should give it a call!

That number works out of the Northern Telephone Company of Minnesota. I called the main number of the Northern Telephone Company to ask them about the intercept message, and had to leave a message. Bob Riddell, the only employee, called me back a day later. I asked him about the intercept announcement, and he just matter-of-factly said it was one of the announcements in his CO. He said he does all of the jobs at the country’s smallest phone company. He’s got 38 subscribers in Wawina, MN, which is about 50 miles west of Duluth, about a hundred miles north of Minneapolis, and about 100 miles from the Canadian border.

Bob’s job duties include handling the financing needed to buy and operate the phone company since 1971. I asked Bob if he also runs the aerial cables, and whether he still runs them through trees? Amazingly enough, he said his plant has been 100% buried since 1972, right up to the premise. There are no aerial cables at all. He said he switched out all his subscriber’s rotary phones for touch tone phones years ago. His Redcom CO switch offers all of the features you could possibly want from a phone company. He said few of his subscribers use many of the features.

I asked him whether he actually plows the cable in with a Ditch Witch, and he said he doesn’t do any of that. All of the buried cable is installed by contractors, using a vibratory plow.

He invited us all to see his CO when we’re in the area (I guess he’s not counting on a lot of us getting up that way!). He built a museum with 800 phones and some manual and automatic switchboards dating back to the late 1800s. Some of them are in working condition.

Bob offered me a phone number that will let you hear ringback and busy off his old Federal Step-by-Step switch: 218-488-1399, then dial extension 6532 for ringback or 6599 for busy (you have to hang-up and call back to try the other extension number).

Northern Telephone Company (Bob) is at 218-488-6565. Bob’s email address is telenutz@mlecwb.net.

If you like the idea of actually making use of old phone systems in an interesting way, a telephone collector’s club, Telephone Collectors International, has their own VoIP "network" that allows members to connect their individual telephone systems together with tandem switches. It requires you to connect your old phone system to the Internet using a free Asterisk VoIP PBX (that runs on a regular old PC with Linux instead of Windows). It would certainly be an interesting learning experience. Asterisk is by far much harder to program than any real phone system (and it’s also very flexible compared to many other phone systems). They keep it difficult to program so that "consultants" can charge companies for selling them a "free" phone system.

If you like old phones, and like the idea of joining up with a bunch of other collectors who have formed their own telephone network that they call CNET, take a look at their web page for more information: www.ckts.info

It’s interesting to look at the CNET Member Directory, which has a listing of phone numbers on the private network. There are all kinds of interesting numbers you can reach, including test numbers and recordings from around the world.

WOULD YOU GET ON A PLANE BUILT BY SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS?

Speaking at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland last month, Mary Ann Davidson, chief security officer at Oracle Corp. (a large software database company), said "The software industry is so riddled with buggy product makers that you wouldn’t get on a plane built by software developers."

That seems logical, but she doesn’t seem to know that all modern passenger jets are software controlled, and that pilots and mechanics simply reboot the thing to get it working when there’s a problem. I guess she wouldn’t be flying if she knew that?

She also asked "What if civil engineers built bridges the way developers write code?" Her answer was "You would get the blue bridge of death appearing on your highway in the morning." That about sums up where quality is in the US, and the world. Because we’ve all paid good money for PCs and software that didn’t work right, and never worked right, more and more companies in other industries are letting quality slide because it seems we’ll put up with it, and keep buying junk. We toss a lot of brand new stuff away that never worked right.

A lot of modern phone systems, and the stuff that connects to the systems, is pretty buggy. Modern electronics is incredibly dependable. The components have become very dependable, and the assembly techniques are very dependable. The problem comes from the interconnection of these gizmos with the real world.

Basically, there’s nobody with experience left in the telephone manufacturing business. The guys who run the companies might have been making toasters or underwear a couple of years ago, and now they are in charge of making phone systems or products that connect to phone systems (trying to emulate a "real" phone line).

While the old switches and key systems were electromechanical and seldom broke, today’s systems are not only electronic, but they’re software controlled. The electronics is dependable, but the software requires an experienced marketing manager and engineer to decide what the software should do, as well as a programmer who can write the code for the microprocessor… that will work the way it’s supposed to.

Having run a department of programmers, I can’t believe how many programmers told me "that can’t be done" when I asked them to do something. The best I can figure is that they’re lazy. Being a programmer myself, I had to explain to them exactly how to do what they said couldn’t be done. Most programmers have bosses that really don’t understand programming, so they do what they want. Since just about everything we buy today for our home, car or office is microprocessor controlled, that leaves a lot of our satisfaction with what we buy dependent on programmers and their bosses – most of whom aren’t in the US and may never be able to afford the gizmo we just bought.

Phone systems are going to get worse before they get better, but you can make a difference by relating your comments and your customer’s comments to your phone system manufacturer’s sales rep or sales manager.

Complaining to the technical support department does absolutely no good. Those guys are simply there to help you make the stuff work as best they can. They have little or no control over how the product is designed, or how it will evolve in the near future. The tech support guys would like nothing more than to make their system do everything your customer wants, but other than coming up with workarounds for missing or broken features, they can’t redesign the system.

Workaround is going to be the magic word for the Interconnect industry for the next year or two. You can keep yourself from getting caught after the sale by making sure you understand the customer’s needs and expectations, and having a system you can play with in your own office to make sure these expectations are realistic before proposing the system. It will take extra time compared to when we were selling "closed" systems that simply connected to a POTS or T1 line, but that’s the state of the industry at the moment. Assuming anything, or believing what the manufacturer says without actually trying it yourself, could make for some trying times when you go to collect the money for the new system.