VCFMW 19 was September 7-8, 2024. As in previous years, I offered telephone services at the show acting as Shadytel Midwest, the midwestern regional Shadytel operating company.
The information in these pages may be updated at any time leading up to, during, or even after the show, so check back for any updates.
See the various sub-pages for specific information:
The telephone directory will include a list of all listed subscribers and services, as well as general dialplan and numbering information
This page will include information on how to use and access the services offered to subscribers.
See this page for information about services offered and how to order them.
Since 2021, I have handled the telephone network at VCFMW. In 2024, I of course ran the network again for VCFMW 19.
This was the biggest VCFMW to date, and the telephone network reflects that.
Subscriber growth slowed between 2023 and 2024 when compared to growth from 2022 to 2023. From '22 to '23, subscriber count grew from 20 to 38 subscribers, a 90% growth. From '23 to '24, subscriber count grew from 38 to 49 subscribers, only a 28% growth. This was expected as I believe growth from '22 to '23 was more related to the visibility of the network in 2022 encouraging exhibitors to participate in 2023 who previously weren't interested or did not know about the network.
As an additional point of comparison, the raw VCFMW exhibit counts were about 85 in '22, 138 in '23 (62% more than '22), and 203 in '24 (47% more than '23).
This means that subscriber count growth outpaced exhibitor growth from '22 to '23, but fell behind between '23 and '24.
Despite subscriber growth slowing down, line count growth stayed about the same. From '22 to '23, number of lines increased from 34 to 66, an increase of about 94%. From '23 to '24, number of lines increased again to 123, an increase of about 86%. This means the average line count per subscriber increased from about 1.7 in '22 and '23 to about 2.5 in '24.
The number of lines per subscriber can be seen in this histogram. We can see that in general, more subscribers order lower numbers of lines than higher. However, we can also see that with 2 or more lines, most subscribers seem to prefer an even number of lines.
The highest subscriber line count, not counting the telephone company itself (with 22 lines) was a single subscriber who had 8 lines.
We can also see similar growth in the number of dialable, listed directory numbers. From '22 to '23, number count grew from 41 phone numbers to 100, an increase of about 144%. From '23 to '24, number count grew again to 167, an increase of about 67%.
At the end of last year I had a number of improvements I wanted to make.
On top of that, we were planning to move to a new larger venue, so I would have that to contend with.
I started early with preparations for VCFMW 19, working on and off on improvements starting pretty much immediately after the show.
My Cisco 3845 ISR has been a staple of the show network for several years providing ISDN tandem switching, VoIP media gateway functions, V.90 dial-in modems, and a few analog lines. For a couple years, asterisk running on a PC had provided a few ancillary functions that could theoretically be provided via other equipment I was already bringing.
In an effort to bring slightly less equipment, back in September of 2023, I worked on coding up a few useful IVR applications to run directly on the Cisco 3845. Those applications are simplistic but useful, providing an automatic number announcement circuit function (ANAC) as well as the ability to record and play arbitrary audio files for the sake of providing recorded messages for use with e.g. 811 calls and a couple other things.
I had tried to have those functions working for VCFMW 18, but had some trouble making them work correctly and decided that I did not have enough time to investigate.
During VCFMW 18, I spent a lot of time dealing with 4 pair cables serving a handful of customer lines that were farther from the 25 pair breakout devices we were using. I decided that a better solution would be to build some 4 pair breakout devices in advance. The original idea was a simple static breakout, but soon I decided that I could solve multiple problems if I added a bit more capability to the device.
The intended arrangement was that each subscriber would have a 4 pair drop line run to them. A breakout device would break their pairs out of the drop line and then the line could continue to more subscribers if necessary for the other pairs.
This meant that, firstly, I would not need to terminate 4 pair cables at the show, I could use premade patch cables for the drop lines. Additionally, it resulted in a subscriber having a single common network interface device that could be labeled with their lines so they knew how to attach their equipment. That way, I would spend less time assisting subscribers with cabling and troubleshooting misconnection issues.
Late in september, I officially started on the design work for the Shady Rate Interface as it eventually became known. I had a prototype layout within a week and ordered boards and parts for half a dozen units.
I built the prototypes in early November and made a few tweaks to the design based on findings before ordering the production run of, I think, 150 boards and parts some time later. In December, I began building some of the boards, and I finished 84 total around the middle of the month.
I also sent some unassembled kits to be used at VCFSW for their telephone network, and a few given to a friend who thought they might have some use for them, leaving 50 unbuilt in my possession.
I had some plexiglass plates laser cut to protect the tops and bottoms of the boards and had everything put together and stored away by March of 2024.
One of the (relatively minor) problems with running a telephone network at VCFMW is all of the cables. You can run them on the ground, but you have to watch out for them becoming a tripping hazard. Generally I've run them along walls and under tables as much as possible to avoid this, but ultimately you have to cross aisles somewhere.
Historically, we've used rugs to cover power and other cabling, but with the move to the new venue, we had improvements in how we could do power which meant I no longer had power cable cover rugs to take advantage of. Combine that with a larger space and larger aisles than we were used to having, and I started thinking of alternative ideas.
The past couple years at VCFMW in the old venue, I had used a couple lighting stands to cross a hallway. I started wondering if I could increase the scale of that.
Around the middle of December, I started to prototype some structural joints out of materials I could get a hold of for free.
The original plan was to build some poles and beams where the beam would cross the aisle and a cable could be strung on it. Initially I had thought that stringing the cable without a support element would be too much tension to have a simple pole stay upright with a reasonably sized base.
However, we decided to do some basic tests and things started to seem less unreasonable. I did some math and found that the required ballast weight on the base (with reasonable safety factor) would be about 60 to 90lbs depending on number of cables, the balance of tension on the pole, and the size of the base.
I constructed some prototype poles and did some testing. The goal was to cross a 10 foot aisle between two 2.5 foot deep tables on each side, with a 2.5 foot gap between the pole and the table, a total of 25 feet. The 25 pair cable needed to not sag below 8 feet for me to be confident nobody would accidentally snag something on it.
I was able to get pretty stable results with 120lbs of sand bags on the smaller of the two bases with 2 25 pair cables strung between 12ft tall poles, tensioned to be higher than 8ft in the middle. On the larger bases, I was able to get away with about 90lbs. I decided the smaller bases would be used to support only a single cable at a time, needing only 60lbs of ballast.
In August, I determined that I would need 24 telephone poles to cover the majority of the 50ksqft event space. However, I didn't have enough materials for that many poles, so instead I made an optimizatation or two and also reduced the coverage to get down to 18 poles.
I then set to work building the bases and crossarms for the poles until I had all the parts mostly done at the end of the first weekend in August.
Later in the month, I purchased about 1000lbs of concrete blocks to use as ballast. At the show, we panic bought a couple hundred more pounds because we were worried about not having enough to keep the poles stable. It was cheap insurance, though it does now mean I have more blocks to store.
In previous years, the ordering process was a single checkbox on the exhibit form indicating that you were interested in telephone services. Then I would send email to each exhibitor to inquire about their telephone needs and wait for a response.
I had about 20 subscribers in 2022, and about 40 in 2023. Emailing each exhibitor individually was taking up a lot of time to get the information I needed.
For 2024, the goal was to have 90% of the telephone subscribers be able to put 100% of their info into the normal exhibitor form. I had to strike a balance between having too many questions while gathering the information I needed.
Since the VCFMW signup form was typically done in google forms, I played around with that platform in late December to see what I could come up with.
I knew that the vast majority of subscribers just wanted an analog POTS line or two for phones or modems. While I wanted to offer advanced telephony services like I always have, it was clear that those services would be too complex to put in a simple, straightforward form. I opted to ask detailed questions to gather the required information for the analog line orders, but the advanced services would remain as simple checkboxes indicating you needed the service. For those services, I would reach out to the subscriber directly to confirm what they needed. This would greatly reduce the number of people I needed to directly communicate with about their telephony needs.
I got a pretty good sample form made in December that I later revised before it was integrated into the official signup form in 2024. The only significant changes I made at that time were to add DSL as a service offering and to divide the advanced telephony services into their own optional page that wouldn't be shown unless you indicated you needed them.
This year, I decided to move to 110 blocks for the MDF. In previous years, I had used wirewrap, but wirewrap is more time consuming and somewhat harder to use.
The intention was to use two 300 pair blocks, one for the 'outside plant' feeder cables and the other for the Meridian and other CO equipment. As a special case, the DSLAM used to provide DSL services would be connected to both blocks so that POTS lines from the switch could be connected to the DSLAM, and then the output of the DSLAM could be connected to the outside plant feeders. The arrangement was designed so that the majority of cross connects would be made from one block to the other, the DSLAM following this as well.
As I wanted to put as much as I could into a 19 inch two post rack, I came up with some bracketry built from specially cut and drilled angle iron to mount the 110 blocks in the rack side by side. Two 110 blocks side by side are somewhat wider than 19 inches, so one block did overhang the edge of the rack.
The Meridian 1 Option 11c PBX was forming the basis of the network again this year, along with the Cisco 3845 for ISDN and media gateway functions. This is pretty much the same setup as previous years but I still had to assign all of the lines and the new trunks.
For the Meridian, this mostly meant copying a couple configurations around numberous times for the two major line types, analog phone and analog modem lines. In a few cases, we set up rotary hunt groups and the occasional special feature.
We also configured the Call Pilot 201i to host a voicemail box as a sort of VCFMW guest book.
After last year, it was a goal to have the rack mounted equipment mostly assembled into its rack before arriving at the show. The rack would stay assembled though the year and be reused in subsequent years with changes as necessary.
This year, the rack contained a Cisco 3845, a Cisco 2511 (not used), a Motorola USD modem bank (also not used), a Cisco 2851, an HDSL2 shelf with H2TUC cards, cross connect field and patch panels, phones, a DSLAM, an ISDN NT1, an internet router, and an ethernet switch, and a PDU. The Cisco 2851, the HDSL2 shelf, and the DSLAM don't belong to me and were removed from the rack once we were done, but they will come back in future years if needed and the space will remain open for them unless their function is replaced by other equipment.
The basic cable plan was that 25 pair 'feeder' cables would string out from the CO MDF on the telephone poles. Those cables would be tapped in 25 pair breakouts generally in 2 different table 'pods' as they passed through, running down the pole, through the breakout, and back up. From there, 4 pair cables would be cross connected into the breakout. Those 4 pair cables would run to the first subscriber and land in a Shady Rate Interface as the NID. If required, another 4 pair cable would connect to the THRU port and continue on to a second subscriber. That second subscriber would also have a Shady Rate Interface acting as their NID.
The initial cable layout was done before exhibitors had been placed into the table plan. There were some constraints based on the number of telephone poles that limited the locations that telephone subscribers could be.
Once exhibitor placement was complete, the telephone subscribers were tallied up for each pod and the cable plan was adjusted based on the concentrations of subscribers and their pair counts. In one case, a table pod ended up needing an additional 25 pair feeder assigned to meet the needs, while another table pod had only a single subscriber and the feeder was downgraded to a single 4 pair cable.
As preparation before the show, each Shady Rate Interface was jumpered and labeled for every subscriber. Then, a number of 4 pair cables were crimped in specific lengths as required for each subscriber drop line based on estimated distances. I had previously sorted 4 pair cables in E6 standard values (~20% tolerance) but determined that E12 binning is probably the degree of accuracy required (~10% tolerance) for this activity.
As 4 pair cables were built, they were paired with their respective Shady Rate Interfaces. This way, the cables did not need to be hunted down at the show, and each one was already ready to be laid out.
All of the cabling, Shady Rate Interfaces, and 4 pair breakouts for connecting to the 25 pair breakouts were boxed up for transport to the show.
Thursday night is when we start setting up show infrastructure, like network, telephones, Centcom/T-shirt sales table, talks room, etc. By Thursday morning, we had almost everything done with just a few final pieces to put together and finish. Then we started loading up my trailer with ballast bricks, the rack, large boxes of cables, and telephone pole parts. The rest of all the equipment was carefully packed away into cars, like the Meridian PBX, tools, smaller boxes of cabling and adapters, and other assorted essential items.
We made one more trip to my storage unit to grab a box of assorted analog phones to lend out to exhibitors, then left for the convention center in the late afternoon. We had to wait some time for the cleanup from the previous event to complete.
Once we were able to enter the space, one of our first priorities was to get the most important supplies unloaded from the cars and trailers, like tools, cabling, telephone poles, and telephone equipment. Our first priority was getting the cable plant set up while there weren't any exhibits in the way. We assembled the poles and placed them in their correct location. We started to unload the bricks and began placing them on the based.
Without the cables strung on the poles, the poles have some extra slop and give to them. We had some concerns about stability, and I was a bit sleep deprived and starting to succumb to stress, so maldridge started to take over at this point. We decided to buy a couple dozen extra bricks to add some to some of the poles.
While that was being taken care of, we began to string the cables up as well. Two people with ladders would raise the cables up and hook them into the poles. We used cable ties to secure them in place where needed.
By the end of Thursday night, we had all of the telephone poles up and the 25 pair strung between them. We had only minor mistakes through the whole thing, nothing that wasn't easily fixed or quickly worked around.
The telephone poles with H-bases had an additional flaw that I knew about but hoped wouldn't be an issue. Due to the way they are designed, they are fairly strong and rigid in the axis of the cross in the middle of the 'H'. However, the design had more flex than I would have liked in the transverse axis.
In the original telephone pole layout, I had distributed poles to ensure tension would be balanced to only apply tension in the longitudinal direction. Unfortunately, lack of materials pushed me to alter the layout to one that did not meet this criteria, meaning there was significant transverse load.
Using a mixture of cat 5 cable and paracord, we reinforced the poles to keep them from flexing side to side. This may be adapted into a permanent fix for future years.
We also began to distribute the bundles of 4 pair cables along with their Shady Rate Interfaces to their respective table pods. However, only about 20 or 30% of tables were placed on Thursday night, with the rest showing up Friday morning from a rental company. Without the tables in place, we couldn't yet string out the drop lines.
I don't remember if we got the Meridian and the equipment rack set up on Thursday night or Friday morning, but we did that as well, getting the cables connected in and routed as best as we could. We also started to work on power cabling and interconnection to equipment brought by co-exhibitors.
On Friday morning, I instructed several volunteers on the correct way to connect and string out the 4 pair cables and distribute the Shady Rate Interfaces. We worked on that as my Co-exhibitors worked on bringing up the network.
By the middle of the day on Friday, we were mostly done with the bulk of the network bringup, with only a few remaining tasks to figure out as our last co-exhibitor showed up to wire in a step switch demo. We also passed out some phones to those who had requested to borrow them.
The days of the actual show, everything more or less went well, although we did have a few issues.
We had one subscriber whose lines would periodically recall the attendant, interrupting modem calls. This is a feature of the Meridian if you hookflash on a set without three way calling or call transfer assigned. I suspect there was some kind of cabling issue causing occasional false hookflash events.
Another subscriber, who had a hunt group, noticed that one of his lines was not working right. We had noticed this sort of issue with the rotary hunt groups while we provisioned the switch. Originally we suspected it was some kind of hardware issue, but after swapping out all of the relevant hardware in the days leading up to the show, we had concluded that it must have been some kind of software issue especially after we realized it effected specifically lines in rotary hunt groups. When this subscriber noticed the issue, we were not surprised. The conclusion is that my installation of the Meridian 1 PBX software is haunted by a few phantom issues it shouldn't have and needs to be reinstalled some time before VCFMW 20.
We also had distortion issues with calls placed from the rest of the show network to AMPS endpoints. Late Saturday night, I realized the issue was a codec mismatch. The AMPS SDR software was using Alaw encoding, while the Cisco ISR that provided SIP to it was using mu-law encoding. I realized this because the distortion reminded me of the distortion you would get if you tried to play the EDRAM recordings using a mu-law codec. The calls were fine if they originated from AMPS because in that case, due to the way that Cisco IOS inbound dial-peer matching work, there was no codec preference set and the preferred A-law codec of the AMPS SDR software would be used.
We fixed the codec preference for the SIP trunk and the issue was resolved.
Maldridge had developed the MoneyPrinter billing system in order to be used for generating fake bills for VCFSW and VCFMW telephone networks. At the show, he wrote the support for ingesting Meridian 1 CDRs and we began collecting billing data around 1PM or so on Saturday.
Some time before Sunday afternoon, we had everything configured to generate and print the bills for all of the subscribers at the show.
Sunday afternoon, somewhat before the shut down of the network, we were faced with a minor problem. We wanted to ensure we billed for all usage, even calls that were in progress when we officially ended the billing period.
After some thought, I decided to initiate a controlled billing event. One by one, I unplugged and replugged each 25 pair cable from the Meridian, causing all in-progress calls to be terminated. This ensured the billing records for those calls were completed, and we began to generate and print the bills on a dot matrix printer.
We handed out the bills as the last task before we started cleaning up. As it was late on Sunday, some of the exhibitors had already packed up and left, but I have saved their bills so that we can track them down next year and deliver them.
As telecom coordinator for VCFMW, I'm always looking for ways to improve customer experience and reduce the amount of setup work involved at the show. Last year, I came up with a list of several improvements I wanted to make and more or less achieved all of them. This year, I'll reflect on those improvements and come up with a list for next year.
This section will be a bit disorganized as there's a lot to capture.
The signup process was greatly improved from last year, and I don't really have any complaints. As a possible improvement for next year, I may add a checkbox that will allow an exhibitor to indicate they want to receive a novelty bill but not receive any services. In this way, exhibitors can choose to take part in the fun of billing without needing to receive services in exchange.
I was mostly able to reuse configurations from last year for most things. We made some improvements, however, which should be documented before crunch time for next year. We added the call pilot into the mix, SIP trunks for AMPS, paging system trunks, CDR generation and collection, announcements and ANAC on the Cisco ISR, and DSL. We had V.90 services fully working this year, as well as Bell 103 and 212A access (or maybe it was just Bell 103).
Additionally, I will need to reinstall the software on the Meridian 1 PBX. When I do that, I might as well upgrade the whole system to the latest supported version as well as Call Pilot. This will likely mean rebuilding the configuration I have, which should get cleaned up anyway.
There were two issues with the Meridian that are driving this software reinstall. The first was an issue with lines belonging to a rotary hunt group becoming broken with no apparent recourse. The other is an issue with line-side T1 cards which prevent them from working after a powerup, unless you remove and reinsert the card, but also causes the card to stop working if it is removed and reinserted again.
It wouldn't hurt to start inspecting the Meridian hardware and pre-emptively recapping it. Some of my equipment is about 30 years old at this point, and it's overdue for SMD capacitor replacement, among others.
Our IP network has also grown in complexity. We built an IP network that involved BGP with more than one AS as well as VPN tunneling to route traffic to off-site resources. The show network itself consists of more than one subnet and some of those subnets would make sense to treat as untrusted such as the dialup internet subnet, terminal services devices, and DSL subscribers.
I need to replace the batteries in the Meridian's RTC as well as the IP router some time before the next VCFMW as well. Those batteries were dead and made it a bit of a pain during equipment bringup each morning.
The 110 block MDF at the CO worked well, but the organization with the patch panels might benefit from some better arrangement. It could also use some improvement with strain-reliefing and routing for the 25 pair cables.
At the IDFs where 25 pair cables were interconnected with 4 pair cables, it may help to do these cross connections in advance of the show if possible. It may also be worth thinking about more robust ways to build proper, mounted cross connect fields of some sort, rather than a ratsnest of cables plugged into a breakout. That's not necessary by any means, but may offer some improvement if there's a clean solution without too much work.
I also had some miswired pairs on the 110 blocks, so I should check all of that and fix any issues before the next VCFMW.
Having the rack pre-assembled did save time at the show.
However, the equipment rack should get reviewed to see what improvements can be made to cable routing and management. 25 pair cables probably could use better strain reliefing, and a better way to stow them for transport.
I have decided that the equipment which lives in that rack will be dedicated to VCFMW and as such I can make the cable routing and such more permanent if I choose to do so. That should give me the leeway to make it a convenient, connectorized piece of the network. Bring it in, plug the cables in, and go.
The Meridian 1, for the past few years, has sat on some chunks of wood, but it would really benefit from having some kind of stands built for it.
Next year, we should also put some effort into ensuring our tables are suitable for the equipment we're putting on them. A number of tables loaned by the venue were unfortunately in poor condition with bent legs and busted corners. We need our tables Thursday night before the rented tables arrive (which were much better condition) but we should be able to be choosy about the condition of the ones we receive.
We should also coordinate on power a bit better. Everything ended up plugged into the rack PDU on my 19 inch rack. That was fine, but I hadn't realized this and pulled power during teardown before everything had been safely powered off.
The Shady Rate Interfaces did their job very well. Some improvements to labeling could be made, I'm envisioning some cut pieces of paper that can be stuck under the plexiglass cover for labeling and detailing the jumper configuration. I used adhesive labels, but now I will have to peel off hundreds of labels before next year.
The 4 pair cabling worked well, but some method of labeling a few aspects should be devised before next year. The length should be permanently labeled, to make it easier to file the cables back away so they can be inventoried and found next year. For the duration of the show, the end of the cable should labeled to help with directing volunteers with plugging in and routing cables. That label should be removable as it will only be used for one VCFMW. The labeling scheme needs to be devised such that it is clear with little explanation to volunteers on how to match cables up with the ports they go to.
For the 25 pair feeder cables, it would be nice if there was a way to secure the cables to the telephone poles other than wire ties. Ideally, whatever is used will be easily adjustable to allow tensioning of the cable. Cables should only be secured to the pole where they run down the pole, and cables which don't terminate or contribute tension to the pole should simply pass the pole without being secured.
Also, velcro straps would be useful for bundling cables when we're cleaning up. It would also be useful to wrap around 25 pair connections to keep them together. We used wire ties for that, but a reusable solution would be better. The screws normally used for securing 25 pair connectors are too fiddly and slow to use for such a temporary setup.
Some thought should also go into the process of stringing up the 25 pair cables. Our thoughts at the end of the show were that it makes the most sense to lay the cables out while two people with ladders bring them up to the poles one at a time and attach them. They will complete all cables strung between those two poles before moving the ladders to save time spent moving ladders and setting them up.
I am very pleased to say the telephone poles basically worked with only minor modifications.
A big improvement for next year will be to work on increasing the rigidity of the H-bases. Perhaps adding some additional bracing, moving to welded construction, or adding cord or cabling (as we improvised at the show) as a permanent element to hold the arrangment in tension.
An additional improvement will be to provide some kind of decking or smooth sheet surface to place the ballast weight on. The H-bases, being of bolted construction, had uneven surfaces due to screws and nuts that made placing bricks a slight balancing act. I had always intended to do something, but time constraints didn't allow me to come up with a good solution before VCFMW.
Care in planning the layout to keep tension balanced is also important. I had originally planned for that but ended up modifying the layout due to time and material constraints that resulted in less balanced tension on a few poles.
There were plenty of volunteers willing to assist with setup. We were able to give them some quick on-site training to make use of their assistance, but it would be nice to come up with some training materials to educate them in advance on the tasks that will need to be performed at the show so they have some idea of how to do them without needing to be trained directly. In any case, there would still be supervision and direction given by me and my experienced co-exhibitors at the show for any of the setup activities.
It would also be good to coordinate with volunteers in advance. We could point them to training information and discuss the sorts of tasks they will be helping with at the show.
As a general topic, there is need for various labels at VCFMW to document a variety of information. Some labels are temporary, valid for only one year, while other labels are permanent, valid for multiple years.
Different techniques are needed for each type of labeling to ensure tha permanent lables are robust enough to survive multiple years while temporary labels can be easily removed or replaced for each year.
For permanent labels, the following are some ideas:
These label types each have their advantages and disadvantages in cost, robustness, and likelihood to snag when pulling cables.
For temporary labels:
This year, I labeled the Shady Rate Interfaces with information such as:
This worked well, but the labels I used were adhesive labels. Before next year, I will have to peel off all of these labels to make room for new labels. Instead, I should come up with a way of attaching a label that is not so permanent.
My leading idea at this time is to print non-adhesive paper labels that can be placed beneath the cover and held in place using the cover and it's mounting screws. The cover will protect the paper and the screws can simply be poked through the paper.
It would also be advantageous to include the jumper configuration on the label.
There are a number of things we've talked about doing, but haven't really managed to accomplish in an organized manner yet.
At the equipment area, we generally have an area setup for sitting, using computers, answering operator and ACD (411/611) calls, and working in general.
This are could have been organized better. Coming up with some plan of the arrangement beforehand would be a good idea, along with techniques to better utilize space. It has been suggested that laptop shelves could be used to get some table space back.
The ACD sets and especially the operator console have fairly quiet ringers. It would be good if some way of attaching visual or louder ringers could be devised. I wanted to do that this year, but did not find the time.
Having a supply of water and a place to put trash would also help out at the CO.
CDR processing could be improved to cover more call cases such as calls which leave the Meridian via ARS. These calls generate CDRs that look a bit different than intraswitch calls.
Bills should be printed with 'addresses' and they should be sorted based on those addresses. That will make them much faster to deliver.
Information about the CO and it's demonstrations would ideally be prepared beforehand.
A network diagram would be nice to show attendees how the entire show network is interconnected. We had a number of visitors who did not initially realize that all of the equipment in the CO was, in fact, operating as a single unified network.
Having signage to explain the pieces of the exhibit would additionally reduce the load of giving explanations to attendees as well.
We had printed and handed out some directory sheets this year, but a larger format one at the CO might be nice to have.
We had several DSL lines working this year.
However, we had some issues getting certain modems configured properly. It might be worth looking into doing PPPoE somehow since many modems expect that.
Some pictures on this page thanks to xhausted110.