[VoiceOps] False 911 calls and old abandoned DID
Mike Johnston
mjohnston at wiktel.com
Thu Jan 21 19:11:48 EST 2021
On 2021-01-21 17:25, Brandon Svec wrote:
> but it also seems just as likely for*any* number to be dialed as it does for 911 so I am still not 100% convinced, but am open to knowing more. Certainly 0 for the operator being 10 pulses should happen at least as often if not more than 911 since it would just need 10 correct pulses and no perfectly placed longer pauses twice after the first 9 digits which seems would be much more rare.
GREAT QUESTION!
The stations I am speaking of are suspended in our equipment, which
means they can only dial a few things: 911, 611, and in our case 777.
The first one is probably obvious. 611 is so the subscriber can call
the telephone company to re-active their service. (For example, a
stations is sometimes suspended for non-payment, so they need a way to
call to pay their bill.) 777 is what my telco uses for line
identification (it reads you back your telephone number).
Suspended lines are generally not maintained as well as lines for paying
subscribers. Thus, this issue most often occurs on lines that are not
able to call the operator, or anything but 911, 611, and 777. Any other
combination would not go through.
Now you may be thinking, wouldn't there be roughly as many calls to 611
as calls to 911? Wouldn't the staff in my company's billing office be
getting these calls as well? Yes, they do get these sorts of calls, but
we haven't logged them like we do the 911 calls, so I can't give you
exact figures. Also, unlike the dispatchers at the sheriff's office,
the telephone company staff can hang up on these calls, and are only
open M-F 8-5, thus it is not nearly as impactful.
If we had such a faulty line on a non-suspended station, which could
call any number, then yes, it would surely be calling all sorts of
destinations. And I agree, calling the operator seems more likely in
this situation, since, as you point out, it just needs 10 identical
pulses, probably followed by a long pause.
> How do you explain the intercept message in the background of a call dialing 911? That sounds to me like the result of a double punched line or crosstalk.
It wasn't dialing 911 at that exact moment. To be more specific, my
logs showed it had called 911 eight times over the proceeding three days.
> Do you care to share what make/model of equipment was alerting you to the "MORE THAN 10 DIAL PULSES WERE RECEIVED” message? Just curious to learn more.
We have four Ribbon C15 units, formally Genband C15, formally Genband
CS1500, which replaced four Nortel DMS-10 units. We still have a bunch
of legacy LCE bays, which I despise because T1s, but also appreciate
because they have emergency stand alone capabilities. The message it
will produce on the terminals is something like:
LIN015 XXXX LCE 01 1 03 23
where XXXX is the site/LCE name, and the numbers represents the LCE
position. If you do a lookup on LIN015, you get:
LIN015 MORE THAN 10 DIAL PULSES WERE RECEIVED IN DP ANALYSIS
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