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 _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf