AT&T Switch operational in basement of WTC

Randy Neals rneals at gt.ca
Sat Sep 15 00:21:39 UTC 2001



Seems almost too good to be true... Does anyone know any more about this?

AT&T's switch in the basement apparently operated after the collapse until
4PM.
They expect to recover the switch hardware....

Hmmmm...

So if you can build a switch room that doesn't collapse when 2 x 110 story
buildings fall on it, why not get those engineers to design the building so
it doesn't collapse in the first place?

-R

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Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom

AT&T equipment survived trade center collapse
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PHILADELPHIA, Sept 12 (Reuters) - AT&T Corp. (NYSE:T - news), the No. 1 U.S.

long-distance telephone and cable television company, said its
communications 
network carried a flood of heavy calling volume on Wednesday, but remained 
unharmed after its equipment survived the collapse of the World Trade
Center.

Calling volume on "the network is running about about 20 percent above a
typical Wednesday morning," AT&T spokesman Dave Johnson said. "There's
heavy inbound surge to the New York and Washington areas and some
network congestion, but nothing like yesterday."

AT&T handles about 300 million voice telephone calls a day.  It carried 431
million calls on Tuesday as customers flooded the telephone lines in the
wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, making it the
heaviest business day in the company's network history, Johnson said.

AT&T's local network switching equipment, which routes telephone calls, was
located in the basement of the World Trade Center towers and survived the
implosion of the buildings, Johnson said.

"It appears the equipment has survived ... It was up and alive and still
providing dial tone by 4 o'clock yesterday afternoon. Once the back-up
batteries ran out, we took them offline, but the equipment is still
working,"
Johnson said.

"We were amazed," he said. "It was several stories under ground and all I 
can say is that they must have built up that basement very sturdy.''

The switching equipment handled calls for AT&T business customers in Lower 
Manhattan.  The company rerouted calls and suffered no network outages, 
Johnson said.

AT&T will retrieve the equipment once it gets approval from New York City 
and disaster teams to approach the rubble of the World Trade Center.  The 
New York-based company said none of its employees were injured or killed in 
the attacks. 





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