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From: roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: AT&T Service Interruption
Message-ID: <15835@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 6 Jan 91 16:36:29 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 12, Message 2 of 11


In article <15817@accuvax.nwu.edu> seanwilliams@attmail.com writes:

> An AT&T spokesman said that the company instructed operators in the New
> York area to provide customers with access codes to its long-distance
> competitors at about 1000 EST/1500 GMT.

	Ignoring for the moment the political problems involved, how
difficult would it be to implement automatic load-shedding without
having to have customers manually dial a different 10xxx code?  It
seems that all that would be needed is for the AT&T computers to tell
the local telcos' computers "OK, until further notice, take all [or
half, or whatever fraction is appropriate] of the calls you would
normally route to us because we're the default dial-1 long distance
carrier, and send them to Sprint or MCI instead".

	There would be some details to work out with the billing, but
that's not really a technical issue.  Callers might get billed
directly by the alternate carriers, or the carriers might bill AT&T
under some sort of treaty; AT&T could then bill the customer normally,
and they might never known what had happened (or, presumably, care).

	Assuming this could all be made to work (at worst, it's
probably a Simple Matter Of Programming), would it be a good idea?
Would the overall integretity of the long distance network be improved
by this, or would the greater coupling between the various pieces
generate the possibility of having a inter-carrier meltdown, making
things worse?


Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy