On fantastic telephone bills

I refer to the article in Your Letters Fantastic telephone bill of June 5, 2000.

Without getting into technical details about how a telephone system works, I would like to use the opportunity to help some people being plagued with extreme telephone bills.

Indeed it is possible that people abuse your telephone line. Very basic, a telephone has two wires. Just like a lamp into a wall socket. If someone, maybe your neighbor..., connects your wires to his telephone, he's able to call at your expense. It's a good idea to check maybe outside the cable from your telephone to the cabinet of PT Telkom. With all cabling above the ground it is easy to abuse someone else's telephone line.

There is a very rude way to prevent abuse. Connect the two wires from your telephone together for a short period of time if you hear people speaking through your telephone. For sure no conversation is possible anymore, and the call is ended. If you think your phone is abused during your working hours... do the same for this longer period. Not very nice, but really works. People calling you will find you engaged all day. Leaving answering machine on does not help in this matter as this is only reacting to incoming calls.

In order to find out who is abusing your phone, you can ask for a printed specification of the numbers you have dialed the past month. Tick off the numbers of your family and friends, and dial the leftovers and try to find out who might be using your line. Number ID like with GSM is possible I think, as Caller ID telephones are sold in Indonesia. This gives you the telephone number of someone not knowing that he's calling to a telephone abuser, though this can be helpful if someone is skimming you and your family day and night.

Of course another possibility is that an engineer of PT Telkom has made a mistake in one of the cabinets with thousands of wires, or water in a cable causing shorted wires etc. To me it looks obvious that it's abuse if someone is asking for Mr... at home. By the way, do you remember the name.... Is he living near you...

As a technician, I can think of some technical solution to prevent this matter, but... sorry to say, abuse is mostly done by your neighbor with access to the wires of your telephone line.

I really hope that some people can stop the abuse, and decrease their telephone bill.

H. VD WEERD

Jakarta