Verizon outage in Southern California?

Tue Oct 18 21:13:58 UTC 2005

On Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:38:06 -0500
  "Olsen, Jason" <jolsen at devry.com> wrote:
> 
>> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On 
>> Behalf Of Matthew Black
>> Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2005 3:13 PM
> 
>> Telephone service is beginning to be restored in the Long 
>> Beach area but is still sporadic.
> 
> Our ATM WAN link through Sprint came back up around 1345 Central time,
> and the two DS1s for the school's Internet service were revived about
> fifteen minutes ago (1507 CDT).  They've been rock-solid so something
> must be going right out there.
> 
> When I called Sprint about any information they might have for the
> outage the tech said that the area was down due to a Verizon DACS
> failure.  That must have been a spectacular failure, because I'm reading
> that it wiped out most everything (
> http://www2.presstelegram.com/news/ci_3128087  indicates four tandems
> hit?! ) in the area.  The articles are primarily focusing on the impact
> to E911 services, followed with the hit to POTS lines.  I have yet to
> see any mention of impact to data in any of 'em.  Here's what intrigues
> me about this outage: if it wiped out E911, most of the POTS and also
> impacted data services (as Jay Hannigan and I can attest), how did the
> cell towers that are also served by the network live through it?
> 
> Jason "Feren" Olsen      Senior Network Engineer     DeVry, Inc

Thanks for the link to the story update. Our OC3C (155 Mbps link)
goes through a place called WestEd (not WestCom) in Seal Beach
which is the headquarters for CENIC, the CA higher education network.
We never saw any data outage for CSULB.

I'm not completely familiar with the telco jargon.
Does Tandem mean the same as a local central office, where
POTS lines terminate at the switch? Long Beach has a population
of 470,000. The C/Os I know of are:

Alamitos at 7th Street and Termino, ZIP 90814

Clark near Clark Ave and Pacific Coast Highway, ZIP 90804

LongBeach at 6th Street and Elm Ave, ZIP 90802

Lakewood at Clark Ave and Connant St, ZIP 90808

LNBHCAXG at 3440 California Ave, ZIP 90807 (for my home)

I have no idea whether cell service was truly affected. The
announcements we sent to our campus suggested people use their
cell phones for 911 service which would be serviced by the
CA Highway Patrol (Erik Estrada, etc.) or a campus telephone
which is serviced by our local campus police (sworn state police).
I was completely unaware of the outage until someone else
mentioned it in my office.

matthew black
california state university, long beach