telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (01/08/91)
This seems to be the season for telecom disasters. Maybe it was the Blue Moon last week or something. Following the AT&T cable cut in New Jersey last week, all was quiet for a few days ... but Monday morning, Sprint managed to chew up a fiber optic cable in northern Indiana which served as a major gateway for traffic in and out of Chicago. The cable went out about 9:00 AM CST, and service stayed out all morning. Apparently crews were close at hand (I think it was a Sprint crew which caused the problem, but they aren't saying), and restoration got underway almost immediatly. By about 12:30 PM CST service had been mostly restored. AT&T seemed to handle much of the overflow without difficulty. For over three hours, Sprint was totally silent here: calls to double zero got fast re-order tone, and one plus calls were intercepted after the 1-NPA-XXX had been dialed and met with dead silence. Illinois Bell and Centel service representatives and operators /repair clerks were instructed to advise complainers of the problem and to use 10xxx routing instead through 'some other' carrier. If anyone gets more specifics, please send them along. Can you imagine the irony of someone who at the end of last week, angry with AT&T about their trouble decided to switch to Sprint because they were 'more reliable' :). As AT&T spokesman Herb Linnen said last week, "we all roll the dice and have bad days from time to time." The Digest reader who suggested there ought to be a 'treaty' between LD carriers and automatic, transparent re-routing in times of emergencies spoke wisely. The sooner something like that is implemented, the better off we will be. Another reader, in a letter to be published soon points out that not all offices are equipped to do that sort of thing easily, but it should be SOP (standard operating practice) in offices thus equipped. Let's not wait until all of the USA is on ESS before we implement it. Patrick Townson
bill@toto.info.com (Bill Cerny) (01/10/91)
This fiber cut affected a private line at a client's site. The IEC is Williams Telecom; but I don't know which company owns this particular fiber cable: Sprint or WilTel. The "treaty" between IEC's that you alluded to is called a protection agreement, and has become commonplace in the long distance industry. When two IEC's networks pass through a common point, they arrange some type of interconnection to provide capacity (multiples of DS-3) to the other in the event of an outage on the other carrier's network. It's "I'll scratch your back..." kind of business, and is being invoked on an increasing frequency as carriers rely more heavily on fiber, and backhoes continue to proliferate. ;-) I'm not sure how "automatic" these protection agreements are though. I inferred from Monday's outage that even in extremis, there's a bit of bureaucracy involved in activating the protection route(s). Bill Cerny bill@toto.info.com | attmail: !denwa!bill