gnu@toad.com (10/23/89)
[also posted to ca.earthquakes, can't crosspost since this is a modgroup.] mbr%cornelian@Sun.COM (Mark Bergman) wrote: > I would like to personally salute all of the city planners, > architects, and engineers for creating such incredible newer buildings > and skyscrapers [that survived the earthquake without damage]. The folks I would like to thank are: ==> Pac Bell <== Their equipment worked throughout, as far as I could tell! That must have taken great planning and good engineering. Nobody on our block had dialtone, but our phones rang four or five times on the night of the quake (friends calling to check on us, who we quickly told to hang up). Even the lack of trunks and dialtone could be prevented. The problem was the obnoxious people who all tried to call their relatives, tying up trunks and dialtones for days. A possible solution when in an overload situation is to only allow one outgoing call per hour at ordinary phones. Don't even let someone compete for dialtone if they have made a call in the last 60 minutes. This would limit the overload to the local central offices rather than tying up trunks, and would offer dialtone to a lot more callers. It would also automatically throttle autodialers like Unix machines. Exemptions for the emergency lines around PBXes; locations that need emergency comm (police, hospitals, utilities, media); pay phones (so real emergencies can be reported even if every idiot on your block has used up their one call -- social pressure will push emergency callers to the front of the line at a pay phone, and keep call duration way down). Of course, education would help, but people have already been told to only use the phones for emergency calls. They just think it is an emergency if they haven't heard from brother or sister since the quake. Get real! Does it really matter if you find out how your friends or relatives are TODAY, or next week? They will end up in the same shape anyway. Meanwhile people calling to report fires, get ambulances, or tell the local radio station what is going on are SOL, while you chat about how the stars are pretty with all the lights out and how much emergency liquor you have. John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com "Watch me change my world..." -- Liquid Theatre