Volume Ii Part 21 (1/2)
MEASURED SERVICE
In the commercial relation between the public and a telephone system, the commodity which is produced by the latter and consumed by the former is telephone service. Users often consider that payment is made for rental of telephone apparatus and to some persons the payment per month seems large for the rental of a mere telephone which could be bought outright for a few dollars.
The telephone instrument is but a small part of the physical property used by a patron of a telephone system. Even the _entire_ group of property elements used by a patron in receiving telephone service represents much less than what really is his proportion of the service-rendering effort. What the patron receives is service and its value during a time depends largely on how much of it he uses in that time, and less on the number of telephones he can call.
_The cost of telephone service varies as the amount of use._ It is just, therefore, that the selling price should vary as the amount of use.
=Rates.= There are two general methods of charging for telephone service and of naming rates for this charge. These are called flat rates and measured-service rates. The latter are also known as message rates, because the message or conversation is the unit. Flat rates are those which are also known as rentals. The service furnished under flat rates is also known as unlimited service, for the reason that under it a patron pays the same amount each month and is ent.i.tled to hold as many conversations--send as many messages and make as many calls--as he wishes, without any additional payment. In the measured-service plan, the amount of payment in a month varies in some way with the amount of use, depending on the plan adopted. The patron may pay a fixed base amount per month, ent.i.tling him to have equipment for telephone service and to receive messages, but being required to pay, in addition to this base amount, a sum which is determined by the number of messages which he sends. Or he may pay a base amount per month and be ent.i.tled to have the equipment, to receive calls, and to send a certain number of messages, paying specifically in addition only for messages exceeding that certain number.
Whether flat rates or measured-service rates are practiced, the general tendency is to establish lower rates for service in homes than in business places. This is another recognition of the justice of graduating the rates in accordance with the amount of use.
=Units of Charging.= While both the flat-rate and the measured-rate methods of charging for unlimited and measured service are practiced in local exchanges, long-distance service universally is sold at message rates. The unit of message rates in long-distance service is time. The charge for a message between two points joined by long-distance lines usually is a certain sum for a conversation three minutes long plus a certain sum for each additional minute or fraction of a minute. In local service, the message-rate time charge per message takes less account of the time unit. The conversation is almost universally the unit in exchanges. Some managements restrict messages of multi-party lines to five minutes per conversation, because of the desire to avoid withholding the line from other parties upon it for too long periods.
Service sold at public stations similarly is restricted as to time, even though the message be local to the exchange. Three to five minutes local conversation is sold generally for five cents in the United States. The time of the average local message, counting actual conversation time only, is one hundred seconds.
=Toll Service.= _Long Haul._ In long-distance service, there are two general methods of handling traffic, as to the relations between the calling and the called stations. For the greater distances, as between cities not closely related because not belonging to one general community, the calling patron calls a particular person and pays nothing unless he holds conversation with that person. In this method, the operator records the name of the person called for; the name, telephone number, or both, of the person calling; the names of the towns where the message originated and ended; the date, the time conversation began, and the length of time it lasted.
_Short Haul._ Where towns are closely related in commercial and social ways and where the traffic is large and approaches local service in character, and yet where conversations between them are charged at different rates than are local calls within them, a more rapid system of toll charging than that just described is of advantage. In these conditions, patrons are not sold a service which allows a particular party to be named and found, nor is the ident.i.ty of the calling person required. The operator needs to know merely of these calls that they originate at a certain telephone and are for a certain other. The facts she must record are fewer and her work is simpler. Therefore, the cost of such switching is less than for true long-distance calls and it can be learned by careful auditing just when traffic between points becomes great enough to warrant switching them in this way. Such switching, for example, exists between New York and Brooklyn, between Chicago and suburbs around it which have names of their own but really are part of the community of Chicago, and between San Francisco and other cities which cl.u.s.ter around San Francis...o...b..y.
Calls of the ”long-haul” cla.s.s are known as ”particular person” or ”particular party” calls, while ”short-haul” calls are known as ”two-number” long-distance calls. It is customary to handle particular party calls on long-distance switchboards and to handle two-number calls in manual systems on subscribers' switchboards exactly like local calls, except that the two-number calls are ticketed. It is customary in automatic systems to handle two-number calls by means of the regular automatic equipment plus ticketing by a suburban or two-number operator.
_Timing Toll Connections._ It formerly was customary to measure the time of long-distance conversations by noting on the ticket the time of its beginning and the time of its ending, the operator reading the time from a clock. For human and physical reasons, such timing seems not to be considered infallible by the patron who pays the charge, and in cases of dispute concerning overtime charges so timed, telephone companies find it wisest to make concessions. The physical cause of error in reading time from a clock is that of parallax; that is, the error which arises from the fact that the minute hand of a clock is some distance from the surface of the dial so that one can ”look under it.” On an ordinary clock having a large face and its minute hand pointing upward or downward, five people standing in a row could read five different times from it at the same instant. The middle person might see the minute hand pointing at 6, indicating the time to be half-past something; whereas, person No. 1 and person No. 5 in the row might read the time respectively 29 and 31 minutes past something. Operators far to the right or to the left of a clock will get different readings, and an operator below a clock will get different kinds of readings at different times and correct readings at few times.
Timing Machines:--Machines which record time directly on long-distance tickets are of value and machines which automatically compute the time elapsing during a conversation are of much greater value. The calculagraph is a machine of the latter cla.s.s. The use of some such machine uniformly reduces controversy as to time which really elapsed.
Parallax errors are avoided. The record possesses a dignity which carries conviction.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 453. Calculagraph Records]
Calculagraph records are shown in Fig. 453. In the one shown in the upper portion of this figure, the conversation began at 10.44 P.M. This is shown by the right-hand dial of the three which const.i.tute the record. The minutes past 10 o'clock are shown by the hand within the dial and the hour 10 is shown by the triangular mark just outside the dial between X and XI.
The duration of the conversation is shown by the middle and the left-hand dials. The figures on both these dials indicate minutes. The middle dial indicates roughly that the conversation lasted for a time between 0 and 5 minutes. The left-hand dial indicates with greater exactness that the conversation lasted one and one-quarter minutes.
The hand of the left-hand dial makes one revolution in five minutes; of the middle dial, one revolution in an hour. The middle dial tells how many full periods of five minutes have elapsed and the left-hand dial shows the excess over the five-minute interval.
The lower portion of Fig. 453 is a similar record beginning at the same time of day, but lasting about five and one-half minutes. As before, the readings of the two dials are added to get the elapsed time.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 454. Relative Position of Hands and Dials]
The right-hand dial, showing merely time of day, stands still while its hands revolve. The dies which print the dials and hands of the middle and the left-hand records rotate together. Examining the machine, one finds that the hands of these dials always point to zero. The middle dial and hand make one complete revolution in an hour; the left-hand dial and hand, one in five minutes. In making the records, the dials are printed at the beginning and the hands at the end of the conversation.
Therefore, the hands will have moved forward during the conversation--still pointing to zero in both cases--but when printed the hands will point to some other place than they were pointing when the dials were printed. In this way, their angular distances truly indicate the lapse of time. Fig. 454 shows the relative position of the hands and dials within the machine at all times. It will be noted that the arrow of the left-hand dial does not point exactly to zero. This is due to the fact that the dials and hands are printed by separate operations and cannot be printed simultaneously.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WESTERN ELECTRIC RINGING MACHINE]
Another method of timing toll connections has been developed by the Monarch Telephone Manufacturing Company. This employs a master clock of great accuracy, which may be mounted on the wall anywhere in the building or another building if desired. A circuit leads from this clock to a time-stamp device on the operator's key shelf, and the clock closes this circuit every quarter minute. The impulses thus sent over the circuit energize the magnet of the time stamp, which steps a train of printing wheels around so as always to keep them set in such position as to properly print the correct time on a ticket whenever the head of the stamp is moved by the operator into contact with the ticket. A large number of such stamps may be operated from the same master clock. By printing the starting time of a connection below the finis.h.i.+ng time the computation of lapsed time becomes a matter of subtraction. A typical toll ticket with the beginning and ending time printed by the time stamp in the upper left-hand corner and the elapsed time recorded by hand in the upper right-hand corner is shown in Fig. 455. It is seen that this stamp records in the order mentioned the month, the day, the hour, the minute and quarter minute, the A.M. and P.M. division of the day, and the year.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 455. Toll Ticket Used with Monarch System]
An interesting feature of this system is that the same master clock may be made in a similar manner to actuate secondary clocks placed at subscribers' stations, the impulses being sent over wires in the same cables as those containing the subscribers' lines. This system, therefore, serves not only as a means for timing the toll tickets and operating time stamps wherever they are required in the business of the telephone company, but also to supply a general clock and time-stamp service to the patrons of the telephone company as a ”by-product” of the general telephone business.