Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: john%zygot.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (John Higdon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Bay Area Earthquake Phone Service Message-ID: Date: 19 Oct 89 06:03:24 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: John Higdon Organization: Green Hills and Cows Lines: 42 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 462, message 7 of 9 In article , dennisb@pdx.mentor.com (Dennis Brophy) writes: > How does the phone service work during an earthquake? Around here, not very well. Cheap shot, sorry. > 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? According to AT&T spokespeople, they were doing this as a "service" to keep the traffic on the Bay Area's phone system down. I guess it never occurred to anyone that there might be reasons for people from outside an area to call in during a disaster. I was able to get through on Telesphere from the Victorville exchange (California High Desert) but not on AT&T or Sprint. > It is also intersting to note that Portland has NO local operator > assistance this evening: "All circuits are busy." I guess if I wanted This was happening in Victorville, also. My theory is that there are many more people than usual calling the operator because their dialed calls don't go through. You called the operator, no? So did I. > So, what is happening here? Why can "little" MCI make its way into > the Bay Area while AT&T cannot? Policy, mainly. But it is also interesting to note that since the quake, my little teapot computer has only been able to contact other teapots. My big neighbors (except for pacbell) either don't answer at all, or if their modem does answer it appears that the computer is dead. All my news at the moment is coming from a small neighbor (who is somehow still getting a feed.) It has been said that a communications network is better served by a lot of small entities rather than one behemoth one. I never believed it; maybe it's true. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !