On voice-mail virus

I am writing in reference to the Dec. 9 letter of Ms. Karen Ide titled Voice-mail virus about someone who tried to force a voice-mail answering system on her. Don't laugh, because engineers want to incorporate such a system into an "intelligent network".

Telephone operators trying to increase revenue devised a way to use a signaling system (SS7 in the jargon-ridden telecommunications business) to play a trick or two. They wanted to give some glamor to our telephones (unceremoniously called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service in the jargon). They wanted telephones to: display the number calling you, display the call duration, forward the call to another telephone and provide voice mail and some more "intelligent" stuff. Mobile phone users think this is bread and butter telephony.

Ms. Karen's trouble started when engineers thought that some quaint laboratory gismo would be something that you would be crazy to pay for. Contrary to businessmen, engineers favor technical niceties in place of business sense. If the car industry would be established the way the telecommunications industry is, you would have an international automobile union that would dictate to you that you must drive only Mercedes and Cadillacs.

Engineers in the telecommunications industry are doing exactly that. They say the new systems are recommended. These engineers keep enforcing rules that for all practical purposes have lost their meaning.

And they have the nerve, at a jamboree they have in Geneva every four years, to say how sorry and worried they are that telephone penetration is so low in developing countries (reading their reports, you might think they were fighting back tears).

Well, there are not many Mercedes and Cadillacs in developing countries either. But count on the way to work how many dealers offer various brands of cars. In the car industry no one tells you that the ashtray has to be gold plated or that a car must have a hub cap sanctioned by a regulator.

In the car business, salespeople who may not even know how to spell "gasoline" tell the engineers what we customers want to have. And more importantly, what we don't want to have.

OSVALDO COELHO

Jakarta