Thursday Hawaii telephone mishap

Sun Oct 28 07:06:49 UTC 2001

On Sat, 27 Oct 2001, Michael Painter wrote:
> "The Maui Visitors Bureau Visitor Information Center  the agency's
> tourist
> call center on Moloka'i  was crippled for 27 minutes."  :) <<
>
> I -wish- that was the extent of the cut.<smile>

According to published reports, it disrupted approximately one-third
of the telephone service in the State of Hawaii up to seven hours.  State
officials (Governor, Public utilities commission, legislature, etc) will
hold the normal hearings and investigations of Verizon.

> Can someone venture a guess as to what would cause Verizon's Maui
> intra-island system to collapse from a fiber cut 100 miles away on
> another Island?

My guess, lack of SS7 diversity.  Although it receives limited public
discussion, the public telephone network has significant risks in
comparison to the Internet.  Because of the public discussion, and
customer demand, ISPs have been forced to invest a lot of money in
network backups and now offer SLA's significantly better than any
telephone company offers.  On the other hand the telephone network
has been undergoing a lot of "value engineering" for the last decade,
reducing their network backups.

I wonder if we have reached the cross-over point, and the Internet is
now effectively more reliable than the public telephone network.

> Oh btw, I wasn't using it during the entire outage, but my ADSL line
> worked fine for the 3 hours that I did use it.

This would indicate a problem in the control systems of the PSTN, since
communications which didn't use that control system were unaffected.