A DECADE after it pioneered electronic mail in Britain with its Telecom Gold service, British Telecom is still telling Telecom Gold subscribers that they cannot communicate with people on the Internet. But some Internet users have been doing this 鈥� often without realising what is involved 鈥� for five years.
Telecom Gold subscribers who send an e-mail message about the Internet to BT are told: 鈥淯nfortunately, due to technical differences, Telecom Gold is not connected to the Internet, so you will be unable to communicate with Internet users.鈥� Telephone inquiries get the same answer.
But tucked away in the corner of an office in Cambridge sits Goldgate 鈥� a gateway between Telecom Gold and the Joint Academic Network (JANET). It is nothing to do with BT and has never been publicised. Goldgate was only designed as a stopgap. So the recent explosion of interest in the Internet and word-of-mouth tales of what Goldgate can do is overloading the creaking system.
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Goldgate was created five years ago when Net-Tel, a British software company based in Cambridge, was using Telecom Gold to provide an e-mail service for schools and colleges. The company鈥檚 subscribers wanted to access JANET and Andrew Gordon, director of Net-Tel, grew tired of waiting for BT to provide a bridge. So he devised his own system and called it Goldgate. Although Net-Tel鈥檚 e-mail service is now defunct, the bridge remains.
Neither Net-Tel nor JANET earns money from Goldgate. Net-Tel maintains the service while JANET pays its running costs. It is BT that earns money from the extra messages sent through Telecom Gold. Gordon says: 鈥淕oldgate was born out of impatience at BT鈥檚 failure to install bridges. It should have been obsolete years ago.鈥�
Roy Murray, head of customer services at BT Messaging, says: 鈥淲e can give no advice to our subscribers. We don鈥檛 support the service and know very little about it鈥�. He adds that BT has no firm plans to provide Internet connections for Telecom Gold or its newer Mailbox service. BT is experimenting with Internet connections only on the dedicated data lines leased by large businesses.
Even using Goldgate, Telecom Gold subscribers cannot send the first message in a 鈥渃onversation鈥� with someone on the Internet. Any attempt to do so fails because BT鈥檚 system misinterprets 鈥淍鈥� 鈥� a vital part of the Internet address 鈥� as a carriage return. But once the outsider鈥檚 first message has got through, the Telecom Gold subscriber can reply.
Goldgate works using a number of dummy Telecom Gold mailboxes. Gordon registered a thousand Telecom Gold boxes to dummy names, and then loaded the box numbers onto a database. The Internet user sends a message via JANET to a slightly modified Telecom Gold address, tagged with Goldgate鈥檚 Internet address 鈥� so 83:NSM1234 becomes 83.NSM1234@goldgate.ac.uk, for example.
The message goes straight to Goldgate, where software strips off the Internet tag, converts the full stop into a colon, and sends the message into the Telecom Gold network. At the same time, Goldgate automatically allocates the Internet user a dummy Telecom Gold box culled from the collection. This box has the prefix JNT. The Telecom Gold subscriber can then reply to the dummy box and Goldgate forwards the message to the original Internet address. From then on, both the Telecom Gold and Internet user can originate messages.
