Report from New Zealand

Fri Dec 31 13:11:29 UTC 1999

At 04:02 12/31/1999 -0800, I Am Not An Isp wrote:
>
>However, the phone system is almost completely useless.  He has two phones 
>in his office and cannot call one from the other.  (Although he says they 
>are on different exchanges, so they might not hit the same CO.)  Dial tone 
>is there, but after dialing numbers, just dead air.  Which is weird, 
>because when I called him it rang and he picked up, no static or 
>anything.  (We do have a switch in NZ, but we have to ride the local PTT to 
>the destination phone.)
>
>This is causing unusual failure modes for some systems, especially ISDN 
>routers which are common in .nz and .au.

I wonder if this is due to the fact that everyone in the time zone is
picking up the phone and looking for a dial tone, or calling all their
friends to see if they survived.

Our local phone company circulated a recommendation to avoid picking up the
phone at midnight.  A couple of million people doing this would cause some
undesirable effects (fast busies, no dial tone and so on).

Seeing the grocery store last night, it wouldn't surprise me if most did
this anyway.

And of course, they will blame the ensuing failure on Y2K.  Can't win.  :)

***********************************************************
Andrea Abrahamsen (nee Di Lecce)             (416) 935-6485
SMC Platform Specialist, Network Operations
Rogers Cablesystems Inc.
1 Mount Pleasant Road, Toronto, M4Y 2Y5
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