Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: houdi!ksp@att.att.com Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Bay Area Earthquake Phone Service Message-ID: Date: 18 Oct 89 20:26:00 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Lines: 46 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 459, message 8 of 10 Dennis Brophy writes about the Bay Area earthquake: > How does the phone service work during an earthquake? > I had to send a fax to San Jose this evening, and AT&T would not > complete the call, but MCI was able to reach my destination in San > Jose with out a problem. Why would AT&T stop service while MCI > permits inbound calls to the Bay Area? > I've heard from others in Portland, that they have been performing > three-way-calls using MCI (not AT&T) from their homes to connect > people in the Sacramento area with people in South San Francisco > cities. > So, what is happening here? Why can "little" MCI make its way into > the Bay Area while AT&T cannot? To begin with, it seems that all the telephone networks deserve to be congratulated for doing as well as it did considering the magnitude of the quake. But to answer the specific question that Dennis asks... In emergency situations like this, it is far more important for people in the area to be able to call out for help than for people to call in. It is also far more efficient -- for example, my brother in Mountain View, (near San Jose) called me in NJ (and he got through easily) , and I called everyone else who might have been concerned about him, which is far more efficient than everyone trying to call him. Therefore, AT&T has sophisticated network management controls and trunk reservation, which were selectively blocking calls into the Bay Area last night, and giving priority to calls coming out. So while there were some difficulties calling in on AT&T, I am yet to see a report that calling out was difficult. I have no idea if the OCCs have such controls, but I suspect that they don't, which would explain why Dennis could call in. I will bet that calling out was much harder on any OCC, though. Krishna Prasad ksp@houdi.att.com AT&T Bell Labs Holmdel, NJ 07733 (201) 949-2619