Conferencing -Scribed By Lord Narayana 1997 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dear Mr. Narayana, Thank you for your time to introduce our conferenceing services to you and your buisness. The enclosed material should assist you in choosing a service to meet your teleconferencing demands. I believe you'll be impressed with the rates, and the services provided. Our only buisness is providing high quality, cost effective, telephone conference calls. we focus on what each customer wants; then design a service to meet those requirements. You'll find our attendants friendly, helpful, and committed to exceptional service. I'm looking forward to contacting you shortly to discuss and quesitons you might have. Should you have any questions or concernes before you hear from me, please call, 1-800-xxx-xxxx (Signed...) Gill Grack, Telecommunications Manager. Now, what wonderful people. They are there to help you out. What more could you ask for? This was a personal letter sent to me by a private conferancing company. This text was done rather quickly, so you'll have to excuse my lack of indepth explanations, regarding things like the junction box and workings of a conferance or beige box.. I'll get around to that next time. It's my believe that any wanna-be phreak getting into it should experience the phun of a conference at one point in their lives. First off, to answer what is a conference? It is a voice bridge set up, by the operator, to allow you to talk to your friends at the listed prices, or you can get it for free, and then pass an 800 number dialin out to everyone. It's like a chatline, except it's voice. All to often, I have heard questions about, what to do to set this up?" It's not that hard, all you need is a little speed, brains, and the ability to ask for what you want from an operator. There are many methods of talking to the operator, if you are doing it through your local telco, what you do is dial 0, and then ask for the teleconferencing operator. From there, tell her that you are intrested in setting up a conference, and want her to tell you about them. This might be good to start. Call right now, and ask for information about their conferences. It's their job to answer your questions. If you're friendly, they will be really nice to you. Then after, when your questions have all bween answered, tell them you will call back, and then hang up. Go get a file on beige boxing, and read that. However, it is best that you do NOT do it from someone's house, as in my experience, not because you might cause their fone to unwittingly ring, but because you might get caught. From my experience, it is best to get a good cordless phone, attach it to the junction box in the alley, and wait in a car or some distance away. With various companies, you can have conferences set up for several months in advance. Also, if you were to have a conference, and everything went okay, then you would be able to use the host pin later on in the week, to set another up. Just make sure you remember all the personal information you gave the conference operator earlier. In the sequel to this, I intend to cover all the parts of a junction box, it's workings, as well as the working of a conference itself. So once your cordless is hooked up, call one telco, and ask for the tele- conference operator, say you would like a 10 port conference, with an 800 dialin, to start relatively soon. It's usually best to try to keep them small, so that if the operator comes in or listens in on the conference, it doesn't raise suspicion to a bunch of kids (if this is the case) fucking around. It's not very day they have a 50 port conference, to last twelve hours. After that conference is set up, ask if you can have two for that week, so one for Sunday, and another one for Tuesday. Then, call the next conference operator. It could be from the same telco, I doubt you'd get the same operator twice. But after you have gone through about twenty or thirty operators, you should have at least two months worth of daily conferenceing going. One note on going through junction boxes, if you ever see a white line, in big large mess of wires, DO NOT TOUCH! This is a dedicated line, and if it should get disconnected, if it cannot reset the connection within 16 seconds or so, it alerts the telco. Within one hour, they will launch an investigation, and have a telco official out there. I believe that after a certain amount of time passes by, the head of telecommunications, will recieve a phone call reporting this event, no matter what time of day it is.. This is going to piss a lot of people off... If you don't like going to junction boxes, go into a few parking lots with several levels in them. Go up and down the stairs, or if you need a key or code, wait for someone to hold the door for you, and you follow them in. go up and down the stairs, mabye through their furnace rooms, or whatever, and you might find their phone box... This should have one hell of a lot of lines for you to play with. There's all sorts of methods, which you can go and find in most areas regarding teleconferences, and beige boxing. If you do not know what beige boxing is, you can try this little experiment. Take an phone. Cut off the ends of the wires going to the jack in the wall. Attach some alligator clips to two of the wires. (Red and Blue) take off the cover to the jack in your wall. Attach the clips to the insides of the jack, so you create a connection. Voila, it is done. Do this on someone else's line. In a junction box, open it up with a wrench, stick one clip one one side of the metal post inside, and the other, just drag down the opposite side. If you see a small spark, then you have found youself a connection to use and abuse. You might want to try opening one to get a better idea. I really don't want to go through the details of a junction box right now. When the phone bill comes around, the owners of that line usually bitch and complain that they never called any form of 900 number or had a conference, and after a while, it would seem that the Telco drops the entire case, and puts a flag on their phone line, not to allow any more conferancing from that line. Eventually, they will get smart, should you live in a town of 200 people, when everyone but you get's a conference billed to them. You might want to try setting up a conference from your own phone line and then denying it later. But, that's not recommended, cause they are expensive, and you might get charged for it. Here are several teleconferencing people... Some accept credit cards, others insist on phoneing you back. You can probably bullshit them out of calling you back, if you are going to card a conference. Tell them you are out of town, or set it up at 2:30 am, and tell them you don't want to wake your family, and can they call in a few hours (after the conf is setup). If you have a kids voice, then don't bother either way. She'll probably just ask directly if you are going to fraud this conference if you sound like a child. I've included the addresses, so it might be interesting to trash around those areas. You might be able to steal a conference, or continue one later after the host pin has been used. Also, if you want to start a conference for us, that would be great to. We could answer any questions you have .. voice! Just drop us the info, at least a week ahead of time, and we'll let you know if we'll be on. Telus Advantage Teleconferancing Services. 1. Call 1-800-667-8517 or the local operator from Alberta, (or ask your local operator to put you through to the teleconferance operator in Alberta. 2. Have a date, number of locations, and length of conferance. a. Operator connects all participants at the time of the tele conferance. Chairperson can request operator to pre-notify participants of teleconferance date and time. Special features include a Question and Answer Polling, Call Replay, and Call Taping. b. Customer Handled participant dial in. (meet me) Participants dial a pre-assigned number at designated time. Note: You will need touch tones for this. This is available 24/7. 800 meet me calls (this is what you want to do) Everyone is given an 800 dialin number, and the chairperson pays for the costs of long distance. this is $.35 per minute per port, $.25 off peak hours. Recording a conferance costs $35 plus conferance charge. Polls and voting costs $75. Question and answer costs $75, and is where the chairperson can take questions from each person, through tone commands. Participants are in que, and are answered in order that they are recieved. Operator Assisted operator prenotification and setup (?) is $.42 per location per minute plus applicable direct dialed charges. 8:00am - 5:59pm. $.30 per minute 6:00pm to 7:59am, all day Saturday, Sunday, Christmas, and New Years. Participants are billed longs distance charges under their own long distance company. If you have video, it is $15 for the first three hours, and then 5 dollars for every additional tape. On customer dial in, billing apply to the number of ports reserved unless the operator is notified to reduce the number of ports per call. Accessing your bridge. Being the moderator: #*0 - Operator assistance #*4 - Secure conferance ON. #*5 - Secure conferance OFF. #*8 - Toggle gain. #*9 - Toggle lecture. Confertech Canada Inc. 1-800-668-4703 -tel 1-800-267-5196 -Helpline 1-800-561-4814 -fax Steve Pope is the Regional Manager - Western Canada. Services offered: Meet Me, Dial out, 1-800's, Call Express, Recording, Broadcasting, Smart(?)polling, Postview, Transcripts. Operator Monitored. I'm not going write all of them out, they are the same as other locations, but note it is possible for the operator to monitor the entire conferance. Cost Comparisons. Type of service Telus Confertech Savings Dial-out (Operator Present) $.42 $.35 17% Meet-me (Operator Present) $N/A $.35 N/A Meet-me (Operator Not Present) $.30 $.24 20% Locations: 1 Eva Road, Suite 215 2015 rue Peel, Bureau 775 Etobicoke, Ontario, M9C 4Z5 Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1T8 (416)622-8200 -tel (514)843-6177 -tel (416)622-6905 -fax 400-3rd Ave, SW. Suite 1400. Ottawa Calgary, Alberta, T2P 4H2 (613)235-2604 (403)239-1119 -tel (Sorry, no addresses) (403)239-7348 -fax Vancouver (604)684-8044 (Sorry, no addresses) Conferenceing, video, Audio, Conferencing technology. I can't remember much about these guys, but they did give me a bunch of tips on conducting a confeerence call... 1. Identify yourself by name and location. 2. Use the "Mute" button when not speaking for extended periods of time. 3. Refrain from side conversations and keep background noise (paper shuffling) to a minimum. A Buisness Conferance Call, Inc. (612)448-9410 (800)448-9410 (800)767-2287 -Fax 1107 Hazeltine Blvd, Suite 307 Chaska Minnesota, 55318 Jill M. Grack - Sales Associate "Now there's a better way to meet over the phone"! Use it to: Keep sales groups motivated and informed! Assist managers to stay on schedule! Communicate new products etc... Help solve customer problems! Improve conventional training! Get info to everyone faster! (Hmm dunno about the last one... Mabye if you talk really fast or something.) Being digitally designed, it is better than others?!? It has automatic level control, immediate speaker detection, and network noise control. Rates: Meet-me $.25/min/line $3.00 setup/line 800 Meet-me $.45/min/line $3.00 setup/line (Operator handled) Dial-out conferences $.25/min/line $3.00 setup/line (Setup charge only applies to the first six lines) Long distance charges: $.20/min/line within the United States $.20/min/line for Alaska + Hawaii $.35/min/line for Canada Standard rates for international calls. Additional Services: Notification of participants of date and time, Lecture where only speaker will be heard, Operator assisted question and answer sessions, Polling, Tape Recording, Transcription, Individual Invoice mailed to each participant, Secured conferances, Automatic daily/weekly/monthly setup, Major Credit Cards accepted. AT&T Teleconferancing AT&T Teleconferancing Service. 51 Peachtree Center Avenue Room 630 Atlanta, GA, 30303 1-800-232-1234 They are available 24/7 with unlimited call time, they do have training available, and you can book a reservation ahead of time. Some of the extra features, are broadcasting, where participants are in a listen-in only mode, roll call, establishing who is present on the call, recording, you can record everything for the conference, transcription, where they have a written document of the call, translation service, where they translate with an online translator using the AT&T language line services. Other than their operator dialed conferences, they also have dialin teleconferencing services, whcih are available 24/7 with conferences from 15 minutes to 24 hours, up to 90 connections, extensions of 15 minutes, International access with the USA Direct service, and reservations. The host dialed services they offer, are available 24/7 and you can connect up to 14 people, to have a conference lasting up to five hours. To use this, you need to dial 0-700-456-1000 with a touch tone fone. It's all menu driven, it will ask for the number of connections, there will be a second recording to let you add everyone to the conference. Setup fee: four dollars per connection, with the host. Usage fees: $.53 per minute per connection, 5pm Sunday - 7pm Friday. Intn'l fees: $.29 per minute per connection, plus long distance. Recording: $20.00 per 60 minutes, with one additional teleconference connection. $10.00 for a duplicate tape. Overnight delivery is $12.00 Transcription: $50.00 per 15 minutes of conference, plus recording charges. (It must be recorded to be printed) Broadcast: FREE! Roll Call: FREE! Translation service: $3.50 per minute, plus charges associated with one additional connection. 800 Dialin Setup fee: $15.00 per conf. Usage fees: $.53 per minute per connection, 5pm Sunday - 7pm Friday. Intn'l fees: $.40 per minute per connection, plus long distance. Caller-Paid dialin : $15.00 per setup of a conf, and $.29 per minute bridge connection charge. Host Dialed Teleconference Serice Setup Fee: None. Usage fees: $.53 per minute per connection, 5pm Sunday - 7pm Friday. Intn'l fees: $.25 per minute per connection, plus long distance. International: $.29 per minute connaction plus long distance. The operator can also make extra connections at 4.00 per connection, plus charges for it's use. The teleconference is "usually" billed to the host, and will usually appear on the hosts phone bill. The next conferencing file will be mostly about operations and how to setup conferences with a little more detail about the operators and handling of calls. eof