CO failures (was Re: Today's Outage)

Wed Aug 12 16:26:54 UTC 1998

>[CO down..]
>
>All the more reason hospitals, etc. should shun Centrex, imho.
>It's putting all your eggs in one basket...

Ameritech wiped out a CO a few weeks ago while working on the
SS7 link at 2pm in the afternoon.  One of the hospitals affected
is pretty peeved about that.  I've gotten used to techs trashing
my data circuits at peak times, but I thought they knew better
than to mess with a SS7 datalink in the middle of the day.

Many electrical outages went unnoticed by the public, until the
introduction of digital clocks.  After that, the public started to
notice the outages everytime their clocks started blinking 12:00.

I suspect the Internet is starting to do the same thing for the telephone
system.  The phone system had many mini-outages which the public
rarely noticed unless they happened to be using the phone at the
exact moment.  Now computers and the Internet are serving the same
function as the blinking 12:00 on digital clocks.  Any blip in the
phone system is magnified by the other connected systems.
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation