telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (10/05/90)
Tens of thousands of MCI customers across the northeastern section of the United States had long distance phone problems Wednesday after a construction crew in Ohio sliced through a fiber-optic cable . The cable, which MCI spokesperson Doug Dome described as 'the backbone of our network', was cut around 9:15 Eastern time. Service was not fully restored until after 5:00 PM Eastern time. According to Dome, repair crews had to do major repairs to the cable involving a lot of splicing. About 50,000 calls were affected. Some were automatically re-routed, but according to Dome, the fiber cut was of the magnitude that many calls were simply lost, or left unprocessed at the point of their origin with some local telco. The affected states were Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and parts of Michigan. Hardest hit was area code 216, including Cleveland. A construction crew employed by the State of Ohio was working on a bridge on the Ohio Turnpike near North Royalton, a Cleveland suburb, when 'a digging machine went down in the ground, grabbed the fiber-optic cable and yanked several feet of it out of the ground', said MCI. A repair crew from MCI's office in North Royalton was on location in fifteen minutes, and remained at the scene until late in the evening Wednesday. The overflow of calls from MCI on Wednesday went mostly to AT&T, with some of the traffic going to Sprint. The overflow caused the AT&T network throughout the northeast to be sluggish and very slow most of the day.
macy@fmsystm.uucp (Macy Hallock) (10/07/90)
>Tens of thousands of MCI customers across the northeastern section of >the United States had long distance phone problems Wednesday after a >construction crew in Ohio sliced through a fiber-optic cable . >A construction crew employed by the State of Ohio was working on a >bridge on the Ohio Turnpike near North Royalton, a Cleveland suburb, >when 'a digging machine went down in the ground, grabbed the >fiber-optic cable and yanked several feet of it out of the ground', >said MCI. MCI's primary backbone switching center is located in North Royalton Ohio. Its a very new, very modern facility. It also handles a lot of calls. Most of the fiber optic terminals are Fujitsu multi-gigbit per second high density type. Although the building is also equipped with several microwave radio links, most of them appear to be used for local links and telco bypass rather than for backbone communications. MCI is very sensitive about network redundacy and its hard to get them to talk about it. I get the impression that they are very aware of the vunerable postition they are in when something like this happens. I do know they are working very hard to establish better redundancy in their network, but these things take time and money ... and AT&T has a real head start. I talked to a couple of my friends at MCI when this happened, and they were quite perturbed. They were quick to point out that they were able to successfully reroute a large portion of their traffic immediatly. They also reminded me of the major AT&T outage we had in Cleveland a year or so ago ... and that wiped Cleveland off the map completely for AT&T. MCI gives group tours of their North Royalton facility. They are fine hosts and are justifiably proud of this high quality part of their network. When I was there, they spent quite a bit of time disucssing their DMS,SS#7 and DACS implementations, even interrupting some of their technical staff to give me the answers. Overall I rate MCI an 8 and the Ohio Turnpike a 3. Macy M. Hallock, Jr. macy@NCoast.ORG uunet!aablue!fmsystm!macy
bryanr@ihlpy.att.com (Bryan M Richardson) (10/08/90)
In article <13027@accuvax.nwu.edu> you write: >The overflow of calls from MCI on Wednesday went mostly to AT&T, with >some of the traffic going to Sprint. The overflow caused the AT&T >network throughout the northeast to be sluggish and very slow most of >the day. How do you mean "sluggish?" Either calls complete or they don't-- the switches do not queue them up in long lines. I didn't hear any reports of network congestion. Bryan Richardson AT&T Bell Laboratories [Moderator's Note: My experience that day was that while some calls got rejected with fast busy signals, others simply got lost in transit. That is, they wandered away into dead silence, no ring/no busy. After a waiting period of maybe fifteen or twenty seconds, I'd simply abandon the call and dial over. PAT]
penguin@gnh-igloo.cts.com (Mark Steiger) (10/11/90)
Talkng about fiber cables getting cut, a cable here was cut and made it so no one in morthern Minnesota could reach 911. All 911 traffic was sent through this cable. It is nice to know that some contractor could make a life-or-death situation into a death situation. [Mark Steiger, Sysop, The Igloo 218/262-3142 300/1200/2400 baud] ProLine.:penguin@gnh-igloo America Online: Goalie5 UUCP....:crash!gnh-igloo!penguin MCI Mail......: MSteiger Internet:penguin@gnh-igloo.cts.com ARPA....:crash!gnh-igloo!penguin@nosc.mil