Re: Thousands cut off from phone service (land AND cell)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ed Biebel <edward () biebel net>
Date: April 9, 2009 4:38:33 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Thousands cut off from phone service (land AND cell)

Dave,

What is suprising is that it doesn't sound like the areas affected  
have very good plans for dealing with this kind of outage.  When Y2K  
was in the forefront of everyone's mind, many communities developed  
plans for back-up communications systems.

At the simplest level, our community had plans to stage all the  
municipal vehicles (which were all equiped with VHF radios and yellow  
warning lights) throughout the municipality (shopping centers,  
community centers, major intersections, etc.) with their yellow lights  
flashing to serve as contact points -- sort of like the old fire  
department corner call boxes.  People would be told to go to these  
contact points which could be as simple as trash truck with a radio.   
A town employee would radio into a dispatch center and request the  
help neeed and the location.  It wasn't perfect but it would mean that  
help would likely only be 1/2 mile away instead of 15 to 20.

It seems like some type of emergency communication plan should have  
existed for just this issue.

Ed



On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 2:13 PM, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:


Begin forwarded message:

From: Ole Jacobsen <ole () cisco com>
Date: April 9, 2009 12:22:46 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Thousands cut off from phone service (land AND cell)
Reply-To: Ole Jacobsen <ole () cisco com>


For IP:

Talk about having all eggs in one basket:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/09/BAP816VTE6.DTL&feed=rss.bayarea


Thousands of people in parts of Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito
counties are without telephone service - both landline and cellular -
and will need to drive themselves to a hospital or a police or fire
station if they have an emergency, officials said.

The widespread outage began at about 2 a.m. as a result of a cut
fiber-optic cable belonging to AT&T, authorities said. AT&T and
Verizon customers in Gilroy, Morgan Hill may be among those affected.

Customers whose service is affected hear a fast busy signal or a
recorded message saying the network is unavailable.

There was no immediate explanation for how the AT&T cable was cut.




Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   Mobile: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: ole () cisco com  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj






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