Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Wed, 12 Jun 91 9:59:04 CDT From: "J. Philip Miller" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: St. Louis Phone Outage Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 451, Message 9 of 11 Lines: 49 Kirk Moir writes: > a) Who manufactured the "high capacity digital cross-connection > system"? I am under the assumption that some kind of DCC switch died. > Please correct me if required. Very conveniently, none of the press accounts have given any real information. In the Sunday paper account (front page of business section) there was a picture of the "computer". It appered to be rack mounted, perhaps 6' tall and 6-8' long. All one could really see was that it appead to have many similar shaped "modules". Could it have been ISDN service? > b) What were the data rates of the affected 2800 services? 2.4Kbps, > DS3, etc.? No details given, but none of the services that have been mentioned in the press would demand very high data rates. > c) What kind of network management was in place to deal with this > kind of outage? Nothing has been mentioned. > d) Did spare capacity exist? Could the trouble theoretically have > been routed around or were most problems associated with non-redundant > subcriber lines? There has been a statement that there are only two of these "computers" in the St. Louis area, so it is not unlikely that it would be very expensive to have redundancy back to the subscriber level. Most of the applications also have been where there are only one a or at most a few lines coming from any particular physical location. The backup that the Federal Reserve used was that of dial up connections. Since all of the mentioned applications have significant security considerations, dial up may not be a viable option for all of them. I, as Kirk, have been very intersted in the technical details. The press has not had any details. I hope that some of the SWBT employees who read this might be able to provide some of them. J. Philip Miller, Professor, Division of Biostatistics, Box 8067 Washington University Medical School, St. Louis MO 63110 phil@wubios.WUstl.edu - Internet (314) 362-3617 uunet!wuarchive!wubios!phil - UUCP (314)362-2693(FAX) C90562JM@WUVMD - bitnet