[VoiceOps] False 911 calls and old abandoned DID

[Brandon Svec]

Thank you for indulging me and sharing this!  While I fully believe this *can* happen and *has* happened I suspect it doesn’t actually happen as often as it becomes a plausible answer and then the line is fixed or disabled or it just stops happening with no known root cause or follow up.  I am a very skeptical person by nature and without hard evidence or the ability to reproduce an issue I will never feel certain ;) 

To further demonstrate my skepticism, I can imagine both the "MORE THAN 10 DIAL PULSES WERE RECEIVED IN DP ANALYSIS” message and the suspected wet/damaged/intermittent signaling hypotheses explained by someone playing around on the line.  It could be malicious or semi-malicious tapped into the line somewhere or even accidental like someone connecting equipment wrong or running metal over binding posts, etc.I can even imagine a telco or CPE tech doing it purposely to upset someone or cause trouble.

Brandon

> On Jan 21, 2021, at 4:11 PM, Mike Johnston <mjohnston at wiktel.com> wrote:
> 
> 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