Attacks Expose Telephone's Soft Underbelly

Mon Oct 15 19:41:11 UTC 2001

On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Steve Goldstein wrote:

> I was told by a Qwest senior officer that Qwest initially restored
> some service in lower Manhattan with line-of-sight laser Rx/Tx links.
> We at NSF use such a rooftop-rooftop link to get our ISP service from
> Qwest which happens to be catty-corner across the street from us.

Interesting.  Qwest originally told reporters that Qwest's
network was not affected by the attacks.
http://www.idg.net/spc_694754_190_9-10025.html

In other news reports, Qwest spokespersons are quoted as
saying there was some blockage, but otherwise Qwest's network
was operating normally.  Qwest didnt' file an FCC outage
report.
http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Filings/Network_Outage/2001/report.html

Due to the security clampdown, I suspect it will be years before
(if ever) we learn what happened with the telecommunications
infrastructure.