166 DEAR HACKER

166 DEAR HACKER

They slap a $5 surcharge on every collect call received. You have to dial nine digits (91 + Personal Security Code) just to get

an off-campus dial tone. They impose a $100 limit on the Personal Security Code (PSC). If

your account runs over $100, they turn your PSC off, even if it’s in the middle of a billing cycle, and even if they didn’t bother to let you know that your account was nearing $100.

The system bills you for a call 45 seconds after you stop dialing regard- less of whether or not the call goes through. If you call long distance and let the phone ring more than a few times, you’re billed for it even if the person doesn’t answer.

The local calls are now timed as opposed to the untimed trunks we used to have.

There are only 400 trunks for over 8,000 phones. Reorders are not uncommon.

The Phonemail answering machine type service does not have enough channels. You could find the message-waiting light flashing on your station, but you might have to dial the message retrieve code 15 or 20 times because you can’t get a circuit.

Is there any FCC ruling that the university is violating by imposing these restrictions on us? Their attitude is more one of “Well, that’s just the way it is. If you don’t like it, pay New York Telephone to draw wires into your room.” Indeed, I have put in a private line. But there are a lot of people who just cannot afford to do that, and are being shafted right up to their tonsils. Any advice?

gmw

If you haven’t already, read our Spring 1988 issue where we describe how such

a system was installed at the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a lot of the same problems. Not much has changed there; in fact, many things have gotten worse. Frequently, every phone on campus appears to be busy because the university refuses to buy enough incoming trunks. Outgoing calls are often just as hard. A recent test revealed a wait of 25 minutes just to get an outside operator (it had nothing to do with the NYNEX strike). Outside operators refuse

TECHNOLOGY

to bill to the originating number because the exchange isn’t recognized as an actual telephone company exchange and they have no way to verify your identity. And ROLM can’t handle call supervision so everything bills after 45 seconds, even international calls, where it can easily take that long just to get a busy signal. For

a corporate setting where individual preference really doesn’t matter, ROLM may

be bearable. But for a university setting, no system could be worse, that is, for the students. We happen to know that Stony Brook makes money from the phone sys- tem now because the bills they send to students are much higher than the bills that come from the phone companies. In other words, New York Telephone doesn’t charge the university for uncompleted calls. Yet the university charges the students. Where does the money go? It’s getting to the point where some universities are as sleazy as AOS companies.

At least Columbia offers you the choice of putting in your own lines. Stony Brook offers no such freedom. The wimpy student government thinks they accomplished something by winning the right for a student not to have a phone at all, rather than winning the right to choose one system over the other.

A company called BITEK has moved in to handle billing. They developed a notori- ous reputation for ignoring student complaints about bills. Finally, someone broke into their Phonemail account (which they never changed from the default pass- word), and changed the outgoing message to “Hello. This is BITEK and we don’t care about your problems!” They’ve also just installed a “state-of-the-art” auto- mated billing computer that sounds like it belongs on lost in space.

As far as we know, there’s nothing illegal about what Columbia and Stony Brook are doing. But it’s damn immoral to rip people off and make already chaotic lives even worse. There are ways of getting even, like scanning out the entire Phonemail system and clogging up the system with junk mail (not using your own extension, of course). Or calling someone on campus and sending a symphony of touch tones. The ROLM switch will dutifully keep the line open until the concert is over, rendering the recipient’s phone useless. But the most effective way is to com- plain until you’re blue in the face and to let those responsible know what’s being said about them.

Good luck.