More automation of toll call details

Press, 5 December 1981, Page 17

More automation of toll call details

Christchurch is now the receiving centre for details of all toll calls made in the South Island from non-STD (subscriber toll dialling) areas. The Post Office’s new zone toll processing centre is in Gloucester Street. Previously, in non-STD areas, details of all toll calls were sent to Wellington. Now, exchanges are using new “markscan” tickets which are sent daily to the centre, from where they are automatically sent to Wellington, where toll accounts are made up. Householders will not notice any difference on their telephone bills, but the change is a big one for the Post Office. The senior supervisor at the zone toll processing centre, Mr G. W. Wiberg, said that exchange operators still had to do "plenty” of writing to fill in details of the calls on the marscan tickets, but the processing would be faster. The centre would process 18 million tickets a year (10,000 a day) from all over the South Island, and some parts of the North Island. The Wellington electronic data-processing branch is accepting the majority of North Island markscan tickets from a Palmerston

North centre. However, on a basis of each centre handling 50 per cent of the population. Christchurch would probably do some of the North Island, said Mr Wiberg. Each card is fed into a document reader which turns it into a “tape,” which is relayed to Wellington by a telephone line on which speech is substituted by electronic Signals. The . data-processing branch there prints the tol-

linvoices which are sent to subscribers. Mr Wiberg said that the centre had created 40 extra jobs within the Post Office at Christchurch. Most of the vacancies would probably occur when experienced zone tolls staff were shifted from their present positions to work with the new equipment. According to the Post Office, all subscribers will receive computer-produced toll invoices by 1983.