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From: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: MCI Cable Cut Disrupts Thousands of Calls
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Date: 5 Oct 90 05:00:15 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 711, Message 1 of 7


Tens of thousands of MCI customers across the northeastern section of
the United States had long distance phone problems Wednesday after a
construction crew in Ohio sliced through a fiber-optic cable .

The cable, which MCI spokesperson Doug Dome described as 'the backbone
of our network', was cut around 9:15 Eastern time. 

Service was not fully restored until after 5:00 PM Eastern time.
According to Dome, repair crews had to do major repairs to the cable
involving a lot of splicing.

About 50,000 calls were affected. Some were automatically re-routed,
but according to Dome, the fiber cut was of the magnitude that many
calls were simply lost, or left unprocessed at the point of their
origin with some local telco. 

The affected states were Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West
Virginia, Maryland and parts of Michigan. Hardest hit was area code
216, including Cleveland. 

A construction crew employed by the State of Ohio was working on a
bridge on the Ohio Turnpike near North Royalton, a Cleveland suburb,
when 'a digging machine went down in the ground, grabbed the
fiber-optic cable and yanked several feet of it out of the ground',
said MCI.

A repair crew from MCI's office in North Royalton was on location in
fifteen minutes, and remained at the scene until late in the evening
Wednesday. 

The overflow of calls from MCI on Wednesday went mostly to AT&T, with
some of the traffic going to Sprint. The overflow caused the AT&T
network throughout the northeast to be sluggish and very slow most of
the day.