[VoIP] CAMA and UK billing

[Donald Froula]

I remember working in a CO near the central telecom
tower in Vienna in 1983 and seeing a man go in to the
meter room with a camera. I followed him in. He showed
me the tape on the floor that marked where he placed
the camera tripod. Another clerk with a jewlers loupe
read the meters and generated the billing. I remember
being amazed at the brute force simplicity of it all!

Don

--- Jonathan Kay <g4vft at btinternet.com> wrote:

> 
> Did CAMA produce fully itemised bills for the
> customers ?
>   Just been reading how the CLI was generated in XB5
> offices on 
> Wikipedia, it's amazing what steam powered
> technology could do.
> Yes, we had subs. meters all right. Trunk dialling
> and international 
> just resulted in faster and faster application of
> units onto the meters.
>  The coin and fee check relay sets, which controlled
> pay on answer 
> payphones, actually had a relay labelled "TBF" If an
> international call 
> was metering "Too Bloody Fast" for the set to
> function within it's 
> design parameters, this would operate and cut off
> the call.
>  In the tiny exchanges, we had to manually read
> meters each month. The 
> larger places had a girl who come along from
> accounts, to photograph the 
> meters. She had a camera with a four sided "horn" on
> the front which 
> covered 100 meters at a time.
>  
>  Jon
> 
> 
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