[Asterisk-Users] Qwest can't/won't

[Steve Murphy]

Hello--

I've been making note of a local situation that seems somewhat
irritating, and thought maybe some of you experts out there, might be
able to propose some alternatives.

The situation goes like this:

Rural Wyoming. Cody, to be exact, but I'd wager that you could almost
anywhere in Wyoming and find similar situations.

The county gov. phones and the school system phones do not provide
callerid.

Why? because they bought T1's at like $1k/mo instead of separate lines
at $100/line/mo each. Saves them a ton of money. Has been for years.
5 or more years ago, callerid was not available out here. Slowly, over
the last 5 years or so, they have been upgrading the populace, so now,
almost everyone reports callerid, except the county gov., and the school
system. They come thru as "unavailable". They both want it, but they
can't afford to get/give it. They'd have to switch back to individual
lines to get that, at over 2x the cost, and they'd rather die.

Now comes the interesting part. Qwest is offering most customers the
option to block anonymous calls. All you have to do is dial a *xx and
you won't get those pesky
charity/politicals/telemartket/pollsters/magazineresubscibers/etc.

And you won't get the county gov. or the school system calls either.

Why? Well, apparently, they say that the switches in Cody/Powell are
old, feature-free switches, and one is a slave switch to the other or
some such. And these old switches provide no capability to play with CID
on T1 lines. And they sure as heck are not going to upgrade the switch
for a small group of country bumpkins. What's interesting to me, as that
of all the features they send us little pamphlets about in our monthly
bills, very few of them are actually available here.

Are there any clever solutions to this problem, for the county gov or
school system?

murf




-- 
Steve Murphy <murf at e-tools.com>
Electronic Tools Company
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