-=> Quoting Lance Lyon to Leonard Erickson <=-

 LL> Hi Leonard,
 
 
 > The full touchtone pad is this:
 
 > [1] [2] [3] [A]
 > [4] [5] [6] [B]
 > [7] [8] [9] [C]
 > [*] [0] [#] [D]

 LL> This is American right ?

No. That's the way touch tone dialing is *defined*, worldwide.

 LL> You don't seem to get touchphones like that
 LL> elsewhere in the world - indeed, most that I've seen (domestic Oz &
 LL> imported) have the letters incorporated onto the numbers, eg 2 has
 LL> ABC, 3 has DEF, 4 has GHI etc. 

You are confusing the letters that are "assigned" to various numbers in
various parts of the world, with the "codes" assigned to the 4th
column of the the (theoretical) keypad.

We don't have that column on our phones either. But those keys were
defined in the standard back in the 60s, and most of the chips for
generating or decoding touch tones know about them.

They were set aside for special signalling stuff (much like "*"
and "#"
were, the original touch tone keypads didn't have those either)

The "2 = ABC" etc stuff is a carryover from the old named exchanges
stuff that dates back to the 1920s on dial telephones. And different
countries assign those differently. It looks like Australia uses the
same assignments for those as the US does.

But the A, B, C, and D tone pairs have nothing to do with those old
mnemonics. 

I think I've seen a few oddball modems that would let you enter a
number a "FA6-0808" instead of "326-0808", but they are
pretty rare,
and, as I noted, what may work in the US and former Commonwealth
countries *won't* work in some European countries. 

If you can enter ATDTEFGHIJKLMNOPRSTUVWXY and *not* have the modem
complain, then it supports those mnemonics. More likely it'll accept
ATDTABCD without complaining, but will object to the other letters.

ps. The only even *relatively* common phones with a 4th column on the
keypad were used in the US Military's AUTOVON system. And they had
weird codes assigned for different levels of "override" that a given
phone was authorized for. 

You could have no keys in that column or 1 to 4 keys there. The various
keys let you call a number in the AUTOVON network, and if it was busy,
you could hit one of the override keys. If that key had a higher
authorization level than the current call on the line you were calling,
you'd be connected and whoever they'd been talking to was dropped. 

--- FMailX 1.60