Selected Daily Notes Archive (Home Page has current notes)

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February 1, 2005

I have another very bad case of poison oak, some around my typing fingers. I'm not going to be too productive for several days.

January 31, 2005

SBC buys AT&T

SBC Communications buyout of AT&T runs counter to the federal anti-monopoly policy that broke up the Bell System in 1984. Regulators now think market forces should dictate telephone company ownership and control. Was then court forced divestiture really necessary? Could AT&T have been broken apart in a better way, gradually, according to competition, and not Judge Green's dictates? Most definitely yes.

The large mergers and acquisitions now allowed reduce a customer's conventional telephone carrier choices. But new technologies give us more total ways to carry telephone calls. Such as over the internet or on a cable T.V. system. The sad exception is wireless, with tacitly conspiring duopolies in many markets. Verizon or Cingular? Who cares? They charge the same. Let's get back to AT&T.

It's entirely possible the only thing needed to reduce the size of the Bell System were federal orders allowing immediate local and long distance competition. Instead we got 12 years of endless worry and wonder and wreckage, as the finest telephone system in the world was taken hapazardly apart. Might Western Electric still exist? Or a healthy Bell Labs? I don't know. But I do know a consistent policy on telco ownership, followed by succeeding administrations, is badly needed.

The Great Blue Heron

Click to enlarge

On Sunday afternoon I spotted a fine looking Great Blue Heron rookery on my way home from Mount Diablo. The picture above shows one from Illinois, the one I saw was on Ryer Island in the California Delta.

January 30, 2005

On the trail today. More telecom tomorrow.

January 29, 2005

Nextel and Sprint keep building tower sites despite merger

Ken Schmidt (internal link) reports,

"The wireless cell site or tower construction business is going crazy -- Sprint and Nextel are both pursuing search rings, areas to locate in -- sometimes right near each other. Verizon is active again and Cingular has started to appear once more. Have not heard anything on TMobile, but I assume that is a matter of time."

"This activity seems to be completing long laid plans that were on hold until mergers were finalized. Sprint and Nextel are proceeding full bore in disregard of their merger. I know of locations where they are close to each other and proceeding on their own. There will undoubtedly be some unhappy landowners with signed leases that will never commence if they do in fact merge."

More from Ken on the cell site or tower location process here. (internal link)

Ken's new site is http://www.celltowerinfo.com (external link)

More on Bahrain

More on Bahrain! Here are two pictures and their accompanying text from the long out of print Girdle Round The Earth, described in my notes for January 25th.

Click on the pictures to enlarge

"In the 1960s the main build-up by Cable and Wireless was taking place in the total-concession areas of the Middle and Far East. The company had introduced Telex to Bahrain in 1963 and it had spread to the rest of the Gulf; in 1966 it opened tropospheric scatter radio links between Bahrain, Doha (Qatar) and Dubai. (Above right) a telegraph operator at Bahrain; (above left) a radio-telephone ship-to-shore operator at Bahrain coastal station."

Girdle Round The Earth: The Story of Cable and Wireless, Hugh Barty-King, William Heinemann Ltd, London, 1979 p. 369.

January 28, 2005

I have so many things telecom to share with you yet all that's running through my brain this morning are lines from T.S. Eliot. This is about changing ones' life and the merciless pull of time. From the incongruously titled 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Read the whole poem. S-l-o-w-l-y. Your life will be enriched:

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, "Do I dare?'' and, "Do I dare?''

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--

[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!'']

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--

[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!'']

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

(continues (external link) ---->

January 27, 2005

A new site for cell tower information

Ken Schmidt has put together a new web site with information on all things cell tower: http://celltowerinfo.com/ (external link) Lease info, cell tower maps, views on the wireless industry, links, and more. Well worth a visit, especially to cell site or cell tower lease holders.

More on Bahrain telecom

Former operator J.R. Snyder Jr. (internal link) attests to Bahrain's equipment and efficiency as described in my notes for January 25th:

"When I worked in the JAX IOC [Jacksonville International Operator Center] the only real way to get to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, etc. was through Bahrain. Our last resort was London, which we avoided like the plague. We dialed the Bahrain country code first on tandems and it would beep and then we entered the subsequent country code which usually resulted in a reorder (busy circuit). We had a top row of direct trunks to the Bahrain operator and they took great pride in their work and making sure your call got through one way or another."

January 26, 2005

Rest in Peace

It is with terrible sadness this morning that I learned 31 American Marines died in a helicopter crash in Iraq. Ronald Reagan once said, "Some people wonder their whole lives if they have made a difference. Marines don't have that problem."

Loading and the loading coil

Q. What is the patent number for the original loading coil?

A. It is U.S. patent number 652,230 which you can view at the United States Patent Office: http://www.uspto.gov (external link) Physicist Michael Pupin's patent in 1900 caused almost as much controversy as Bell's telephone patents. As the crucial invention for extending long distance circuits it was an extremely valuable patent and hence contested by groups like AT&T which eventually bought the rights. It also served as an incentive for the Bell System to found Bell Labs. As Wasserman put it, AT&T had been "played to a virtual tie with a lone inventor working in an academic setting. . . This point was not ignored by management."

The definitive book on loading coil history and early long distance working is Neil Wasserman's book, From Invention to Innovation: Long Distance Telephone Transmission at The Turn of the Century. John Hopkins/AT&T Series in Telephone History. 1985.

Details from the patent. Click to enlarge

January 25, 2005

Bahrain and telecom in the late 1970s

In 1978 Bahrain was the first country to operate a commercial cellular system. (internal link) It was probably a simple, two cell affair. Why Bahrain and not, say, Saudi Arabia? In the 1970s the former British colony of Bahrain was the center of telecommunications in the Middle East. Cable and Wireless operated the latest local and toll switching equipment, a satellite ground station, and a training academy for Middle Eastern workers. In Girdle Round The Earth: The Story of Cable and Wireless, Hugh Barty-King says:

"Through any of the nine automatic exchanges of the Bahrain Telephones internal network run by Cable and Wireless, under the direction of Alec Sherman, anyone could dial in from outside Bahrain and be connected via the satellite station direct to London. Those who wrote only Arabic could confidently telegraph their business associates abroad in the knowledge that the Message Switching Computer in Bahrain would switch telegrams written in Arabic script."

Barty-King also writes:

"[C&W's] wide ranging telecommunication system has made Bahrain a commercial and financial centre second to none in an area where oil revenues had brought other states very much greater wealth. The telecommunications build-up which began in 1947 as seen, and had been accelerated in 1968 which was going to expire in July 1982, had given the island a new role. The pearl fishing industry on which the economy once depended was no more; the first oil well to be found in the Gulf was all but spent; cheap natural gas had given birth to cheap aluminium smelting; Saudi Arabian oil was refined and ships of all nations repaired. But none of these activities justified the frenzied hotel and office building on the reclaimed land at Manamah. It was the availability of instant, cheap telephone, Telex, high speed data, facsimile and television communication which had attracted the money-brokers, the off-shore banking units, the off-shore traders, the international airline operators and news agencies like Reuters with their Monitor Project, the shipping companies and stockbrokers were giving Bahrain its new prosperity."

Click to enlarge

"The Kingdom of Bahrain is an archipelago of low lying islands located in the Arabian Gulf of the eastern shore of Saudi Arabia." This graphic was from: http://www.miceonline.net/bahrain/intro.htm.

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