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Re: New 10 digit dialing problems



We went through area code splits and additions several years ago here. It
was minor chaos...not too bad though as we had ample warning. We had about a
year to make the transition, then when several big companies freaked out the
phone company granted us another 6 months. I estimated that it cost us about
20K in labor to do the reprogramming - I had one guy on full time doing
remote programming, and I spent a good 4-5 hrs a day doing remotes from the
office and then at night from home too. I got a LOT of them done at night.
The older panels, and some panels that we couldn't remote program we had to
send techs out. We did not charge for remote programming (duh), nor did we
charge for onsite programming as long as we could do it during normal
business hours. We DID charge if the client had to have onsite done on
weekends or at night, but we only charged a 35 buck trip charge, but still
it was an incentive.

During the whole adventure I made the investment of owning my own 800 lines
permanently forwarded into my CS.

We had well over 1000 accts and made the deadline ok.


"R.H.Campbell" <rh.campbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:YRz6g.4243$ix6.323175@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
| Effective 17 June 2006, residents of the two area codes 613 and 819 in
| Eastern Canada will be required to dial the area code before the number in
| order to make any kind of local call. This has a major bearing on how
alarm
| panels work, since they too have to dial a 10 digit receiver number, and
I'm
| sure most alarm companies are rushing to reprogram their customers panels.
| However, I have to wonder what is going to happen to all those many
| thousands of older panels which have been acquired through aquisitions by
| the larger companies, and which are not capable of being dialed into to
make
| the necessary changes to the receiver number. It doesn't seem practical
(or
| even logistically possible) to make a visit to each panel to program the
| changes, especially for the largest companies with multi thousands of
these
| panels in service.
|
| I have to wonder about those customers who will never know their panels
are
| not working until they fail at a time when they are most needed, since at
| least one of the largest companies routinely doesn't use automatic test
| signals, and as such, no "failure to communicate" troubles will ever show
up
| on the keypads. Also, you have to wonder how many fires will go undetected
| early because smoke detectors are unable to call in to the monitoring
| station, and the bearing that will have on liabilities at all levels...
| (Hello Prudential !! )
|
| I know 10 digit dialing has been put into place in many other areas of
North
| America previously. Can anyone that's gone through it shed any light on
what
| happened in their area when it came about, and what sorts of things we can
| expect to see here.
|
| Any way you look at it, it doesn't appear to be much of a pretty
picture....
|
| RHC
|
|
|




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