by John Hammond writes of Touch-Tone service suddenly working on his
line, and speculates about a switch upgrade. More likely, the switch
hasn't been upgraded.
My understanding is that with crossbar switches, Touch-Tone has to be
enabled for groups of 100 lines at a time. Thus, if a ``neighbor''
has the service, you can have it, too. This is in contrast to modern
digital exchanges, where all lines physically can have it, but a
configuration bit tells the switch whether or not to honor the tones.
A year or two ago, NY Telephone announced that they were going to
start looking for people who used Touch-Tone without paying for it,
and send them a bill. I haven't heard of this actually happening yet.