blast from the past

[cellio]

I just got a phone message, at work, from a researcher in Belgium who had questions about NetBill, a project I worked on at CMU in the mid-90s. Nifty.

I wsa just one of the staff flunkies (not the principal investigator), so after I answered his questions as best I could and redirected him to the PI, I asked how he'd found me. (The NetBill web site has since gone down.) He described a sequence of links that started with an article in the Guardian (UK), then passed through a French newspaper, then led to a company that's no longer there (Digicash), then led to (I think?) a cached copy of the NetBill web site, which had a list of project members, and from there he found my personal web page, which links to my current company. (I'm trying to remember if I was first alphabetically among the project team. That might explain why me and not the PI. Um, no, there was a "B".) Given all that I'm not sure why he called instead of sending email; shrug.

I learned something in the process of trying to return this call: my cell phone isn't "authorized" for calls to Europe. (Well, technically, all I know is that I can't call Belgium. I'm generalizing, perhaps appropriately.) Huh? Not that I've bumped into this in the year I've had it, but still... I don't remember turning on any kind of filtering, and when you buy a phone you expect to be able to make arbitrary calls with it, yes?

(I didn't want to use my employer's phone without figuring out how to pay for the call, so I tried the cell first. When that failed I asked how to compute the rate, which turned out to be much lower than I'd thought it would be. I thought overseas calls would be something like 50 cents or a dollar a minute, not 15 cents.)

Comments

[rectangularcat]

You need to get your phone specifically approved for international calls. It's silly and I really don't understand why they do that.

[geekosaur]

Because of cellphone theft (and theft of service via cloned ID chips). Used to be that stolen phones/IDs racked up huge international LD bills.

[cellio]

Do they really mean "international", or do they mean "overseas"? I've never tried to call the (Canadian) in-laws from my cell phone, but I'd be pretty annoyed if I couldn't -- because if I were trying to do such a thing, it would be because I was lost on the streets of Toronto and needed navigational assistance Right Now.

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

My T-Mobile phone has a deal through which I can call all 50 states and Canada for regular useage charges. Canada isn't considered international. To get international calling, though, I had to go through a credit check, and I actually failed it the first time. They had some weird requirements like having a full year of service, all bills paid on time for the past 12 months, plus credit rating approval. After the first time I failed, I had to wait 6 months to apply for it again! So, yeah. International calling is apparently only for the rich and timely. I am not really either of those things. I finally passed, but it was hugely irritating. :(

[rectangularcat]

I think that depends on your provider. In my case it was overseas and Voicestream had outrageous rates there. I think that since T-mobile took over they became more reasonable.

I loved the fact that Canadian calls were treated on par with American ones. Most of my calls were to Steve in Vancouver and I used the mobile mostly on weekends when I was visiting there (This way my relatives could reach me)