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From: macy@fmsystm.uucp (Macy Hallock)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: MCI Cable Cut Disrupts Thousands of Calls
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Date: 7 Oct 90 14:33:00 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 718, Message 8 of 12


>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 .

>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.

MCI's primary backbone switching center is located in North Royalton
Ohio.  Its a very new, very modern facility.  It also handles a lot of
calls.  Most of the fiber optic terminals are Fujitsu multi-gigbit per
second high density type.  Although the building is also equipped with
several microwave radio links, most of them appear to be used for
local links and telco bypass rather than for backbone communications.

MCI is very sensitive about network redundacy and its hard to get them
to talk about it.  I get the impression that they are very aware of
the vunerable postition they are in when something like this happens.
I do know they are working very hard to establish better redundancy in
their network, but these things take time and money ... and AT&T has a
real head start.

I talked to a couple of my friends at MCI when this happened, and they
were quite perturbed.  They were quick to point out that they were
able to successfully reroute a large portion of their traffic
immediatly.  They also reminded me of the major AT&T outage we had in
Cleveland a year or so ago ... and that wiped Cleveland off the map
completely for AT&T.

MCI gives group tours of their North Royalton facility.  They are fine
hosts and are justifiably proud of this high quality part of their
network.

When I was there, they spent quite a bit of time disucssing their
DMS,SS#7 and DACS implementations, even interrupting some of their
technical staff to give me the answers.

Overall I rate MCI an 8 and the Ohio Turnpike a 3.


Macy M. Hallock, Jr.     macy@NCoast.ORG      uunet!aablue!fmsystm!macy