The New Jersey Numbers Racket

Telcordia - the name strikes fear into the dark little hearts of accountants at both the equipment manufacturers and the phone companies throughout the U.S. telecom market. The best analogy that I've ever come up with for Telcordia is that it is the Mafia without the cuddly characters that make "The Sopranos" such wholesome family fun.

Before I go any further, let me state for the record and for anyone from Telcordia who might be reading this that I love Telcordia deeply and truly. If Telcordia were a woman I would abandon my family in pursuit of her up and until she swore out a restraining order against me. Please, please don't hurt me for anything that gets inadvertently typed here. It's the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters thing in action, you know, and I certainly can't be expected to read - much less edit - everything that those simians expell into the ether.

Evolution
Telcordia used to be called Bellcore in the days after the courts decided that AT&T, like Napolean, had too much power and broke it into lots of tiny Napoleans - still with too much power, but this time with the added attraction of really obnoxious attitude problems. After the breakup, Bellcore was like the smart girl in high school with the bad overbite: abandoned by all of the big-shot telephone companies who didn't want to be associated with her in public and certainly didn't want to appear to be going steady or anything like that, but supported on the side by a steady stream of tutoring revenue. In this analogy, the tutoring revenue was the money that Bellcore was paid by the telephone companies to be in charge of setting up standards and keeping the network software working, a job that it continues to do today under the much less comprehendable name "Telcordia".

Telcordia now has three main functions that it provides to the outside world - standards, operating systems, and selling you their services to be able to comprehend the first two functions. In terms of standards, Telcordia is still nominally in charge of nearly all of the standards used operate the telephone networks - and they have found a way to standardize just about anything. I would not be greatly surprised to discover that there is is working group within Telcordia trying to standardize the number of hairs allowed in a field technician's comb-over. There are standards for how fast equipment will burst into flames if exposed to a blowtorch (really), standards on how much light can reflect from the surface of shiny objects (yep, also true), standards on the formats of all signals that go through the network, standards on which standards to use, and standards on the format of standards. Every once in a while, usually coincidentally around the time that Telcordia needs a quick infusion of cash for a company party or something equally critical to the continuing quality of the telephone networks, Telcordia decides to re-issue the standards. They not only charge companies to participate in re-writing the standards (all the better to avoid actually working on the standard themselves), but they then charge everyone in the industry a fee to get the new version of the standard. It's a great racket - one that would make the Gambino family jealous in its audacity and ability to capitalize on the addictions of its victims - but it pales in comparison to the pure graft of their operating systems business.

osMINE, ALL osMINE!
When the AT&T monopoly was broken up by the still-reviled Judge Green in the 1980s (little known insider fact: saying the words "Judge Green" while using AT&T long distance will, on occasion, cause your telephone to explode), all of the new miniature monopolies decided to let Telcordia continue to be in charge of the software that runs the networks. That software, written in the 1970s using a combination of FORTRAN and a push-pull mechanical lever system, is still running the networks today. It is so huge and so embedded that removing it would be more difficult than extracting Microsoft from the international conspiracy for world conquest. Since this software is running every part of the network, any new features or new equipment that is developed must be integrated into the software before it can be used in the network, and that's the root of the evil that is OSMINE.

OSMINE stands for Operations System Modification for the Integration of Network Elements. Alternative readings include Old Systems Move Intelligent Newcomers Elsewhere and Our Stupid Moose Is Nearly Equine (the latter very rarely, and only in Canada). It is the labyrinthine process established by Telcordia to allow them to suck money directly from the bank accounts of anyone who has anything to do with providing a telephone connection to anyone anywhere in the United States. Say you're a company building telephone equipment and you've come up with a new piece of equipment that costs tons less, is half the size of the old equipment, and cleans up the environment by running on discarded gum wrappers and beer cans. You'd think that the telephone company would want to put that equipment into their network immediately, and they might indeed have that impulse. However, you, Mr. Equipment Provider, must first complete OSMINE. And OSMINE will take you over a year to complete and cost you (literally) millions of dollars. So, now that you've been bled dry by Telcordia, the equipment can be installed, right? Nope, now the telephone company must ALSO pay Telcordia for the updated versions of the software and then customize it to make it work with their particular network operations quirks. Yes, you read that right - Telcordia gets paid on both ends.

Gross Failure of Divine Supervision
But wait, there's more! Since the old software is so creaky, it has touble understanding new features - kind of like the trouble grandpa has understanding that aluminum foil should not be placed into the fancy new microwave. A terrific example, which has the unexpected benefit of being true, is when the equipment manufacturers sped up their equipment to support OC-192 (see Acronymphomania below for a worthless explanation of what OC-192 means). OC-192 was the first time that a three-digit number had ever been used, and the software couldn't handle it. In the real world, that wouldn't be such a big deal, but in Telcordia world that was a HUGE deal. It made them have to bring out the big guns - a GFDS (Generic Feature Development Something-or-other), which basically means that they had to charge everyone involved extra money for the effort of re-doing something fundamental in their systems and and hire some smart high-school programmers to change all of the "2"s in the programs to "3"s. Even today, nearly a decade later, Telcordia still charges extra for the OC-192 GFDS every time anything using that technology goes through OSMINE. And there are dozens of GFDSs on the books, and more showing up every year. It's a steady source of income - kind of like the Atlantic City casinos, but with less chance of the "customers" actually winning anything in return.

In Conclusion - or - Why Are You Still Reading?
The cost and trouble of going through OSMINE is one of the big reasons that so many telecomm companies ran out of money during the telecomm boom. (Another, much less important reason was the huge expense of handing out employee perks like free caffinated drinks, chocolate, and high-performance sportscars.) It's also a primary reason that few technology innovations make it through the bureacracy to the home user. Did you know that in Japan people regulary get home internet speeds of 40Mbps or higher? That's about 30 times faster than most DSL lines in the US and, for comparison, would allow a teenaged girl to download the entire Brittany Spears music collection in less than a minute and/or her father to download the entire Brittany Spears photo collection in under an hour. The latest offering from the local telephone companies may, just may, get home users up to a speed 20 times slower than Japan. Anything more is probably just too difficult to get through the system. But who really needs that bandwidth anyway? You'd probably just waste your time downloading porn or sharing music files or working from home or something.

On a final note, Telcordia was purchased recently (ok, several years ago) by a company named SAIC (Some Acronyms Incomprehensible Completely) which has, as its other primary business, contracting for the US Government. I really don't think it's necessary to even come up with a joke here. You can provide your own.

Acronymphomania

It occurs to me that if I am to become wildly popular, I'm going to have to spend a bit more time explaining telecomm to those of you who understand telecomm as "what happens when I pick up the phone". Otherwise when I make an extremely humorous statement like

"Telcordia has decided to abandon the RBOC market so that it can focus on its core competency of shaking down old ladies and running numbers games from the back rooms of New Jersey strip clubs and White Castle restaurants."

about 10 of you will laugh hard enough to make the coffee spurt out of your noses and into your beards, while the remaining thousands of loyal readers will quickly lose interest and go back to compaining about the "American Idol" voting scandal. (Not that I have anything against "American Idol" fans. I love you all from the tops of your carefully styled and quite entrancing hair to the bottoms of your perfectly formed feet.)

So, from time to time I will use this space to provide the educational information that is so necessary in proving that writing these messages is indeed an integral part of my job description. Let's start with the basics today, shall we?

Acronyms

There are more acronyms in telecomm than there are fish in ... well, very large fishbowls full of fish. The Telecom community just loves acronyms, as the use of a well-placed acronym can make the difference between being the most intelligent engineer in the room and being ridiculed so mercilessly that you eventually mumble something incoherent about MPLS coding and run off to cry in your Volvo.

Like almost every other engineering graduates, when I started my first real job I had absolutely no clue about the product I was working on, industry I was in, or how to dress in clothes that did not declare my admiration for a 1980s hair band. I was very quickly overwhelmed by the acronyms, and started keeping track of them in a document on my computer. Sure, a less geekly human might have just kept a sticky note or piece of paper nearby to record the acronym droppings, but engineers think differently. We must be able to aphabetize our lists and put section headers and titles on the pages! Otherwise, we'd be out sobbing in the Volvo again after the other boys and girls make fun of our technological incompetence.

For those of you in the telecomm business, every last one of you is now saying, "Yep, I did that too." If you're not saying it, you're thinking it loudly and the people in the next cube are starting to pick up on the vibrations, so would you ming keeping it down, please? For those not in the telecomm business, this should give you a bit more insight into the everyday hilarity that the telecomm business affords. What's even more depressing is that my list soon grew so large that it was taking a significant amount of my "working" day to administer. I eventually gave up and decided that it was just easier to sell the Volvo and go to the internet whenever a new acronym appeared. Plus, it gave me an excuse to have the web up and running 95.8% of the time that I was in the office (lots of acronyms to investigate, you see.)

To help you, dear reader, avoid this type of dire situation and to enable you to impress your less technical and potentially more physically attractive colleagues of the opposite (or at least somewhat compatible) sex, we here at Telecommedy present a short list of the most important telecomm acronyms.

POTS: Pronounced like the cooking instruments that some people use when boiling water or making a particularly tangy red sauce for their pasta, POTS stands for "Plain Old Telephone Service." Really, I'm not kidding about this one. In the world of acronyms this one is king, and yet it is by far the one hardest to get anyone to believe is real. POTS refers to the electrical stuff that comes into your house and makes your phone ring and allows you tell Great-Aunt Elsie that you miss her super-special chocolate cake with the little dancing bunnies made out of leftover fruit salad. It's the start of everything telecomm, and nearly everyone in the business completely despises working with it which is why the only people who care about POTS are the older bearded gentlemen (and women - usually un-bearded) who work for the largest of the phone companies. Everyone else prefers their telecomm more removed from the end customers, as customers often do unexplainable things like speak in a language bereft of comforting acronyms. A fun activity to amuse yourself around an engineer - sneak up behind him and yell "POTS!" and watch his skin literally crawl off of his skeleton and make a break for the comfort of the nearest Starbucks.

SONET: Pronounced like the English word "sonnet", although not nearly as comforting and usually not found in romantic poetry tomes, SONET refers to "Synchronous Optical Network". Clever how they used the "NET" from "network" to come up with that acronym, isn't it? Otherwise, it would just be "SON", and that just wouldn't do for reasons that I could explain only if you were present in front of me and could see the hand motions that I am now making at the computer screen. SONET refers to a standard named GR-253 developed by Telcordia when it was Bellcore and after it was a part of AT&T (don't worry about it, there won't be a test at the end). Basically, it's a set of rules that all of the companies building fiber optic equipment have agreed to follow so that they can be connected to eveyone else's fiber optic equipment. Similar to the practice of loading up new pack mules with so much equipment that they had no energy remaining to cause trouble on the trail, new engineers entering the fiber optic sub-phylum of telecomm are issued a copy of the SONET standard in paper form. Those who mange to survive the first week without giving up and joining a new-age cult are allowed to continue in the business, although usually without a greater portion of their egos. Fun activity number 2 - ask an engineer if he works with "SONET networks" and watch his mouth get all clenched and frothy as he explains that "SONET network" is redundant. Then ask him about "BLSR rings" and watch his head turn around completely.

BLSR: I suppose now you want to know what BLSR stands for, don't you. Well, it refers to another cleverly named standard - GR-1299. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? BLSR (pronounced B-L-S-R, just like it's spelled of course - you try to say a word without vowels) stands for Bi-directional Line Switched Ring. (Those of you paying attention just got the joke above and are now snickering loud enough to annoy the dog, so please cut it out.) BLSR is one of the ways that the telephone company makes sure that their network keeps working even when a technician cuts an underground cable in an attempt to become instantly famous with their immediate supervisors. Don't worry about the details - just trust that it takes all of the telephone calls, internet traffic, and instant messages about last night's "totally awesome" episode of the OC and sends them a difffent way so quickly that normal human beings can't distinguish the switch from the normal static present on their antique Mickey Mouse telephones.

ATM: Ah, here's one that you think you know! Everyone knows what ATMs are, right? Well, those crazy telecomm engineers decided that one ATM in the world was not nearly sufficient and they came out with another one. This one stands for Asynchronous Transfer Mode, which is a pretty impressive thing to say if you can avoid stumbling and coming out with Asexual Transvestite a la Mode (another ATM, but not one that will be discussed in this family-oriented publication). ATM (the asychonous, not asexual one) is a technology that chops up information into same-sized little packages so that they can be sent all around the world and put back together again. (Please note that this does not work when shipping pets, as getting the pieces to be exactly the same size can be extremely difficult.) If you want to look feaky smart, tell someone that you're working on deploying ATM over a SONET BLSR to provide POTS. It's great line to use in a singles bar, although for some reason it has never really worked out that well for me personally with the exception of the one young lass whom, I believe, thought that I was offering to sing while withdrawing cash to pay for her cooking supplies.

DS1, DS3, T1, OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, OC-192, STM-1, STM-4, etc.: These and many more refer to how fast information is sent along a particular wire. (For the geekly out there, I'm calling a fiber a wire, ok? We're trying to be helpful here, let's all learn to build up before we tear down. Go play a few games of Doom on the office network and come back when you're in a better mood to interact with others. We'll wait.) Speed is measured in the number of "bits" that can be send in a second. Bits are ones or zeros - that's all. Nothing more complicated than 0 or 1, but all of those 0s and 1s can be combined to form everything from an email explaining that the rash has almost gone away and you're ready to re-enter the dating scene to pictures of your dog Brutus violating the armoire in your foyer. Obviously, the more of those bits that you can receive in a second, the faster you can get the emails or naked pictures into your computer and displayed prominently on your monitor. (The monitor is the thing you're looking at now, but surely you know that. You're not reading this through AOL or anything, right? Not that there's anything wrong with that - we love our AOL friends even more dearly because of the limitations they must overcome to be productive members of society. Truly we do.)

The number of bits per second is recorded in thousands of bits (kilobits), millions of bits (megabits), or billions of bits (gigabits) per second, and those are some really fun words to say. We in telecomm sometimes just sit around and yell "Gigabit!" at each other until we are rolling on the carpet squares squealing in laughter. A DS1 is the slowest of the bunch at 1.5 megabits per second. (Mbps - an acronym, of course, but you still pronounce it "megabits per second". The vowel problem again, I suppose.) Just to make it interesting, a T1 is the same speed (don't ask why if you really don't want to know). A DS3 is not, as you might suppose, 3 times faster. It's actually 45 Mbps (incidentally, the same as a T3, but let's not dwell on that right now). An OC-3 is the same as an STM-1 and is 51.84 Mbps. An OC-12 is four times faster (this time the numbers do work that way) at 622 Mbps, the same as an STM-4. An OC-48 is four times faster again at 2.4 Gbps, the same as an STM-16. There is no STM-2 or STM-3, neither is there an OC-4 though OC-11. And there are also STS-3s that are the same rate as OC-3s and STM-1s, but are used in different places. See it's all so clear once you get the basics, kind of like orthopedic surgery.

WDM: This one takes nearly as long to say as an acronym as it does to say un-acronymed, unless you pronounce the "W" the same way that President Bush does ("Dubya", fow those of you who don't follow the news or read the comics page of your local newspaper). WDM stands for Wavelength Division Multiplexing, and was one of the hottest things going before the telecomm bust in 2000 that killed dozens of WDM companies and resulted in the closing of many of the choice bars and pubs in Silicon Valley. WDM is a technology that puts different colors of light onto the same fiber optic wire (settle down, now) at the same time. So, you can run multiple OC-48 speed signals at the same time on the same wire and get even more bits from point A to point D in even shorter times. Now ... now do you understand why billions of dollars (gigadollars) were spent during the telecomm bubble chasing the dream of fast-moving bits?

My fingers are bleeding

Really, if you're still reading to this point you should be awarded a medal consisting of a shiny object and a life beyond your computer. I hope you have learned something useful that can be used in your next management evaluation to increase your base salary above that of the jerk that you hated so much in high school for embarrasing you in front of everyone with that thing (you know that thing, I don't need to bring it up in public, do I?). Thank you for your attention. Please return to Doom, already in progress.

OK, here's the deal

I've always wanted to write. Prefereably something really popular that generates a lot of money. Maybe not "Harry Potter" kind of money, but perhaps something along the line of Asimov's Robot series. You know, a group of loyal fans that will continue to buy sequels no matter the quality, allowing me to work a few days a year and vacation on the Riviera.

Alas, after a bitter internal battle complete with recriminations and some painful wedgies, the more practical side of me won out in college and I ended up with an Engineering degree and a pitiful lack of creative writing experience, unless you count the creative writing that went into some of the reseach papers that suddenly and inexplicably became due tomorrow at 8am. Since that time, I've been fortunate enough to write a variety of very technical articles and papers that have been published widely and read only by the parakeets in whose cages they have entually been deposited. And no one has ever paid for any of them or even asked for an autograph, even at those innumerable Geeknik trade shows with the cast of bearded thousands.

So, after years spent in the wilds of telecom, allowing my writing talent to shine only in the occasional pithy email missive, I've been forced by my latent less-practical side (now fully recovered but with a nasty attitude and lingering mild bruising) to start writing again. As my only recent experience has been in writing about telecom, it seemed like a good place to start. Plus, this way I can legitimately claim that time spent writing here is related to the time spent writing for my employer, who pays much better and occasionally feeds me.

Telecom is actually a ripe field for comedic exploitation. Really, you're going to have to trust me on this one. The telecom bubble of the last few years generated an innumerable list of completely ridiculous characters and experiences that have garnered very little attention outside of the aforementioned bearded thousands. There has been scandal, error, and sex (ok, not too much of that last one - this is about telecomm employees, after all), all of which are enormously entertaining for the observer if not for those who are too close to see the humor in, say, losing more money than the gross national product of Paraguay.

Finally, I must mention that nothing I write in here is in any way connected to the truth. And it is definitely not about you, your friends, or anyone that you have run into at a Geeknik. Sure, you many think it's about you, since the facts line up well with your experiences, the dates are the same, and the people involved have the same names and social security numbers. But believe me, it's all fictional. Really.

Let's see how this works out. Won't you please join me as Trolley turns the corner and enters the land of Telecommedy?