On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 10:53:39PM -0800, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
Ten years ago, MCI hosted the IETF in Dallas. Someone thought it would
be a nice idea to give every attendee an MCI card that would be good for
free calls to anywhere in the world during the IETF week.
Of course, the IETF community being what it is, a number of people decided
that "free calls anywhere" was a concept that needed to be tested, fully.
As I recall, various parts of community interested in security and
privacy were swapping cards around to scramble any attempts by MCI
personnel to learn anything about which phone numbers we were calling.
This was before the days when companies made a regular practice of
providing a privacy statement and at least making a public commitment
to honor it (while the back office people would keep a few thousand
credit card numbers for testing purposes, natch).
By Tuesday afternoon the hotel switchboard was overloaded and
hastily-created signs began appearing in the hallways, elevators and
elsewhere saying something to the effect of "please disconnect your
permanent connections..."
The switchboard was overloaded not because of the permanent
connections. Tthere were only a few people doing this, but they were
costing MCI $$$ because the international calls resulted in real
dollars being spent on international circuits, as opposed to just
utilizing otherwise unused circuits on their domestic network.
Although it was somewhat amusing to learn that at least one employee
of one of MCI's competitors was keeping permanent connections to
places like Sweeden on MCI's nickle....
Rather, the hotel had a certain number of (voice) T-1 lines dedicated
for AT&T, SPRINT, and MCI long-distance traffic, and with the MCI
cards, it meant that everyone was overloading the outbound MCI trunks
while keeping the other trunks unutilized. The hotel eventually
reconfigured their outbound trunks, but it was also really annoying
for the hotel because the only thing that has a higher profit margin
is alcohol, and so not only did it cost them money and extra headaches
for the hotel telecom manager (with whom I had a chance to chat at the
end of the conference as I helped the host team with the terminal room
tear down), but the hotel also lost a substantial amount of income
that they normally would have counted upon when hosting a group of our
size. Oops.
Note to Nokia: Although we'd love a free cellphone and a SIM card for the
week, you might want to consider the consequences...
Heh. Well, there is always the Nokia 770....
- Ted
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