Disconnect Supervision, POTS tricks and Skype

From my sordid youth, of pitching Nortel and Toshiba key systems and PBX's my favourite sales manager of all time Johnny "Nortel" Williamson always made sure when we were inspecting old PBX's to check to see if they had the software upgrades that allowed for disconnect supervision. Essentially this made sure that when you hung up your handset the loop start circuit was closed and you didn't leave a port open for 24 hours to Kuwait racking up a $700.00 phone call charge from your Telco. Apparently this was an issue on some really old systems, and was a good reason to pitch an "upgrade", which was basically the same thing in a new casing for twice the price.

I was calling someone on Skype today which reminded me of the old POTS anomaly where you would pick up the phone and low and behold there was already someone there. The conversation always started, "oh I was just calling you, your ears must be burning" etc. It was always really JoJo psychic'ish when you were about to call that same person as well. The cosmic duality of twisted copper, playing out in front of you.

This is what jarred my memory of the "old days" - if this cross talk was to happen today on a VoIP service everyone would be flapping about security and terrorist listening in on your calls...





Aside from the grammatical error ("just" isnt' needed), I had a good laugh.