Fiber won't work without electricity

Sun Oct 10 02:29:48 UTC 1999

Scott Drassinower wrote:
> 
> At 1pm, MCI WorldCom had all MFS service restored that was in or passed
> through White Plains.  It turns out it wasn't a fiber cut.
> 
> The building they are located in (One North Broadway, which in addition to
> being a regular office tower includes POPs for pre-WorldCom MCI, MFS,
> and seemingly Nextel) was having electrical work performed by the building
> management.  They had to shut down the entire building's power to get this
> work done.  I stopped by at 12pm, and the building's security guards said
> management notified tenants last month they they would have no electricity
> on 10/9.
> 
> At 7 or 8am the power went off, and the MFS batteries failed at 9am.

There's this neat device called a generator... Guess MCI Worldcom never
heard of 'em... Gotta wonder what they do during blizzards and other
such natural disasters. Relying solely on batteries, and having only an
hour or two of capacity seems rather foolhardy...

Now, to be fair, if electrical work was being done in the building, it
is possible any backup generators that did exist were also turned off
while the work was being performed.

-- 
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Daniel Senie                                        dts at senie.com
Amaranth Networks Inc.            http://www.amaranthnetworks.com