'fone foo

[eirias]

One of my best friends moved to Alaska in August, and over the last few months I've had some strange errors when I try to call her. Two days ago I hit enough errors in a row that were SO CLEARLY weird that I decided to send an email to GCI, the main service provider in Anchorage, to find out what's up. The errors were things like:

* Dial her work number; am told in a twangy unfamiliar operator-voice, "We're sorry, you must now dial 1 before the area code when making local calls." Um. Anchorage, last I checked, was not a local call, and I did dial a 1. Dial again; managed to connect, with extremely poor audio.

* Dial her home number; an answering machine with an extremely bad connection. Later, dial it again and am told, "We're sorry, that number has been disconnected." Dial a third time immediately and again, the answering machine picks up with an extremely bad connection.

I should note that my phone keeps the number you have just dialed on display, so I can tell when I have or haven't dialed a wrong number.

Anyway, I've been playing email tag with GCI Dudes about this. Last night he called and said, hey, this is GCI Dude, if you could send us a test call to figure out what's up, just hanging up after it's rung a few times, we'd appreciate it. Today he emails me and says, could you make that test call? and I say, I did, at around 8:30 your time, and he says, Well, we have a call at that time from this number: 954-xxx-xxxx. That area code is in ... uh ... Broward County, FL.

I'm going to make another test call tonight just to see if the error is consistent, but right now I am really stumped. Has anyone else heard of a problem like this one with the switchboards? I've had occasional "wrong number" errors with other outgoing calls where I am pretty sure the "wrong" wasn't on my end, but never with the frequency of these Alaska attempts. At first I was annoyed but now I'm just really curious.

Comments

[sam16.livejournal.com]

If you have access to a different phone, I would try using that phone to place the call. Maybe even try from several other phones. That could potentially help you see if any part of the problem is with your phone or the wiring on your end.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

It's a good point; I don't have another phone myself, but could borrow one from one of the neighbors tonight, and I might. I think it's unlikely to be that something is fucked up with my line in general, because no one else has trouble with caller ID when I call them -- I show up as "Me (608) XXX-XXXX" when I call cognative, and not "Granny Lutz (954) XXX-XXXX." But it would be interesting and probably useful to GCI Dudes to demonstrate that multiple phones have trouble connecting to Alaska, because as far as we know right now it could just be that my phone has trouble talking to Alaska. So, thanks for the suggestion!

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

At my previous job, which dealt a lot with wireline telco stuff, I noticed that Alaska in particular has a certain tendency to weirdness. It might be that some of the calls getting routed through Canadian telcos. But we definitely saw weird billing records for calls from Portland to Anchorage; it wouldn't surprise me if it were a general phenomenon.

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

tod's family has noted weirdness when calling the cabin phone in canada, so i think the possibility of wonkiness being secondary to being routed via canada is very possible.